Recruiting in China

For Liu Kai and Yu Min, about to graduate from Harbin Institute of Technology’s Weihai campus in Shandong Province and on a job-hunting trip in Beijing, the indignities are piling up.

For one, as students from outside Beijing, they aren’t allowed into job fairs held on the campuses of some Beijing universities. At the job fairs they do attend, most jobs are either too low-level, sometimes just requiring a high-school diploma, or too advanced, geared for applicants with years of working experience.

But the main source of humiliation is the issue of pay. For applicants with no work experience, the base salary for a sales job is as little as 1,000 yuan to 1.500 yuan (around $146 to $234) a month.

“We don’t have high salary expectations as long as we can make a living on our own,” says Liu.

But can they live on 1,000 yuan a month?

To put it in perspective, a migrant worker in Beijing earns around 1,200 yuan a month, and many so-called ayis — or aunties, a term for housemaids – can make twice that. As for accommodation, sure, it’s possible to find a 12-square-meter single room beyond Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road for 350 yuan a month but a 1-bedroom apartment rarely rents for less than 1,500 yuan a month, judging from listings at real-estate portal Soufun.com.

A survey of more than 1,000 college graduates from 14 universities in Tianjin finds that 9.8% expect a first salary of below 1,000 yuan a month, while 62% see a monthly pay in the 1,001- 2,000-yuan range, while not one expects a salary beyond 5,000 yuan (in Chinese here).

At the job fairs, Yu finally lands an interview for a sales position with a monthly base pay of 1,000 yuan. A plus is that food and dormitory-style accommodation are paid for. But he still passes on the chance after a phone call from his parents. “My mom strongly rejected my idea to go for this company, as she didn’t think the 1,000 yuan salary was enough for me to survive on in Beijing,” he said.

Yu’s mother doesn’t want him to accept anything for less than 3,000 yuan a month. Judging from the job-fair billboards, that seems an increasingly unrealistic goal. “I don’t see any possibility of that for now,” Yu says.

At a job fair in Zhongguancun, nicknamed Beijing’s Sillicon Valley, a privately owned company selling cosmetics online is hiring telemarketers, at a base salary of 1,500 yuan a month. “We indeed see a lot more college graduates applying for such comparatively low-level positions this year”, said human-resources manager Liu Yansong.