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Skilled worker shortage hits Guangzhou

By Zhan Lisheng (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-30 07:46

A skilled worker at a high tech company in Nanhai district, Foshan, Guangdong province in December in this file photo. [Xinhua]

Human resources manager Liu Taining is seeking skilled workers and order management assistants for a garment company in the Pearl River Delta city of Foshan.

But to his disbelief, Liu is having difficulty finding enough staff to fill the company's needs.

"We have attended several job fairs in the past couple of months, but have not yet found enough staff," he told China Daily yesterday.

Liu aims to recruit more than 300 skilled workers and another 60 employees to take charge of order management.

"We received many applications from job seekers in the first quarter of this year when we were freezing the recruitment plan. However, very few of them approached us for an interview when we told them about these jobs just two months later."

Liu believes many workers looked for jobs elsewhere when they could not find employment in the Pearl River Delta region earlier this year.

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According to the manager, the orders his firm received in the first half of this year were about 80 percent of the figure a year ago. About 60 percent of those came in May and June.

Liu's puzzlement is typical of human resources professionals in the Pearl River Delta region, which is a key manufacturing hub of the nation, or rather, of the world.

"The human resources market in the Pearl River Delta region is rather abnormal this year," noted Cai Xiaomei, a public relations manager of www.job5156.com, a key human resources website based in Dongguan, a boomtown in the delta region.

"Our job fairs used to see booms in February, March and April in previous years, but not this year," she said. "We did not see any busy recruitment fair until May this year."

According to Cai, job openings almost halved from February to April in Dongguan, with about 10,000 vacancies each month.

However, she said, about 9,000 companies registered for booths at the recruitment fairs in May and June, offering more than 80,000 jobs each month.

Companies in Dongguan used to receive the majority of orders before the Spring Festival in late January or early February, said Luo Ziqiang, an executive with the municipal labor and employment service center of Dongguan.

But this year orders were not been placed until late March and early April owing to the global financial crisis.

"As far as I know, a few enterprises recently initiated large-scale recruitment programs or are planning to do so," he said.

Li Miaojun, director of the provincial development and reform commission of Guangdong, said the province needed to clear several obstacles before its economy could bottom out and rebound, including the slow growth of industrial production and foreign trade, businesspeople's reluctance to invest and the economic losses of many manufacturing enterprises.