In the recruitment season of "Golden September and Silver October", Zhang Qing has accumulated more than 20 resumes forwarded by relatives and friends on WeChat, asking him to help introduce a job. This is a situation that Zhang Qing has not encountered in previous years.

Zhang Qing is a senior executive of a listed manufacturing company. Every mid September, he begins to prepare the company's budget report for the following year, taking into account factors such as revenue, profit, personnel size, and equipment investment. By December, the personnel and investment plans for the following year will be finalized. In this year's budget report, it is highly likely that the recruitment quota for fresh graduates in 2027 will be reduced to half of previous years.

This type of contraction is a contraction on a high base. In the past few years, Zhang Qing's company has issued 100-200 offers to undergraduate and junior college graduates, and has also recruited nearly 200 graduates with vocational education for basic positions. He said that this scale is difficult to sustain, and now companies rarely hire formal contract workers.

In addition to the company's business fluctuations and increasing competition, the recent layoff of fresh graduates at Xingyu Corporation is also one of the important reasons for the company to reduce expenses for fresh graduates. Zhang Qing said that previously, government departments would encourage key enterprises to recruit fresh graduates, so enterprises have a certain motivation to recruit fresh graduates. But after the layoff scandal at Xingyu Corporation, manufacturing companies will be more cautious in assessing the potential risks of campus recruitment.

Li Qiang, Vice President of Zhilian Recruitment, introduced that campus recruitment usually starts preparation half a year to a year in advance, and top manufacturing companies generally place early approval in July and August. Formal autumn recruitment is concentrated in September and November, and spring recruitment is conducted from January to April of the following year. Unlike social recruitment that values immediate combat capability and is willing to pay for experience, when companies do campus recruitment, they value long-term potential and are willing to spend time cultivating new talents.

According to recruitment platforms such as 51job, SciClone International, and Zhaopin, manufacturing companies have shown new characteristics in their demand for fresh graduates: "involution" forces manufacturing companies to adjust their demand for fresh graduates and ordinary workers, and they are more willing to recruit "hire as you go" employees; A large number of basic positions that could have recruited undergraduate and junior college graduates are being replaced by intelligent devices.

Shrinking measures under fluctuations in net profit

Over the past month, Du Qi has given more than 700 employees in the factory the longest holiday in the company's history, from September 25th until after the National Day holiday.

Du Qi is the deputy general manager of a large tire manufacturing enterprise, mainly responsible for personnel and other related work. The company he works for has been awarded the top ten outstanding private enterprises in the local area. According to his understanding, there are two leading tire manufacturers in the same industry who start a holiday two days before the Mid Autumn Festival, and the time point for taking the holiday after the National Day has not been determined. Many small and medium-sized tire manufacturing factories in a major tire manufacturing province have been on a long holiday since September 15th.

Giving employees a long vacation is not simply a benefit, but a forced semi shutdown of the company. He said that the company does not rule out continuing to implement a semi shutdown strategy in November and December, which means the factory will only produce for about 20 days per month.

In recent years, under the influence of global trade frictions, Du Qi's company has lost a considerable amount of stable orders from major European and American clients. Despite the company's attempts to increase exports to South America and the Middle East through transit trade, it is still difficult to make up for the lack of stable orders. In addition, since 2024, the prices of rubber and carbon black, the two major raw materials for tire manufacturing, have experienced a sustained high growth, leading to a continuous decline in corporate profit margins.

He said that the tire manufacturing industry is now a competitive "arena". When the enterprise has entered such an operational state, it is difficult to continue investing energy in recruiting fresh graduates and expanding the scale of employment.

Macro data shows that the scissors gap between raw material prices and factory prices, combined with supply and demand contradictions, is jointly compressing profit margins and becoming a major dilemma faced by a large number of manufacturing enterprises.

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the scissors gap between the year-on-year growth rates of CPI and PPI widened for four consecutive months from March to June 2026, and remained at 3 percentage points for the following two months.

Zhang Lin, Vice President of Far East Credit Research Institute, said that the sharp difference between PPI and CPI reflects a "hot up and cold down" pattern in profit distribution: in the cost driven inflation environment, newly added profits are mainly concentrated in the upstream resource industry, and the profits of the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors in the middle and downstream are continuously squeezed, which can easily lead to a situation of "increasing income but not increasing profits" for middle and downstream enterprises.

The fluctuation of net profit often spreads to the recruitment end in 1-2 quarters. The observation of Wang Jian, a senior career consultant at 51job, is that the recruitment needs of manufacturing companies are highly correlated with the number of new orders. Factors such as overseas customer order cuts, tariff increases, and significant exchange rate fluctuations can cause companies to shift from "expanding enrollment" to "freezing" within a few months.

Wang Jian stated that in addition to external demand factors, if a company is in a period of overcapacity and destocking, and the overall operating rate of the industry is declining, the company will prioritize digesting existing production capacity, and school recruitment will naturally tighten. If the production plan of a new factory or production line is postponed, the school recruitment quota reserved for this purpose will be directly cut off. Many of these positions exist for "capacity allocation" rather than "stock allocation business".

According to data from 51job, there have been cyclical fluctuations in the demand for campus recruitment in the manufacturing industry over the past decade. For example, from 2018 to 2019, under the influence of trade frictions, export-oriented manufacturing industries were under pressure, and industries with high dependence on foreign trade significantly tightened their demand for employment, including directly suspending campus recruitment; From the second half of 2020 to 2021, against the backdrop of limited overseas production capacity, China's exports surged against the trend in order to "fill the gap". The recruitment demand of related enterprises was significantly strong, especially in industries such as electronics, home appliances, and machinery outsourcing.

In June 2026, the "Campus Recruitment White Paper 2026" released by 51job showed that from 2020 to 2025, the total number of campus recruitment positions for fresh graduates experienced a phased change of "expansion peak correction stabilization". Based on the effective job posting volume in 2020, it will be 1.14 and 1.33 in 2021 and 2022 respectively, while in 2024 and 2025, the annual average will only be 0.79. The demand for campus recruitment will shrink by about 40% compared to the peak period.

Proactively recruiting undergraduate students with lower costs

One of Chen Tao's experiences when recruiting fresh graduates is that he prefers to spend 5000 yuan/month on undergraduate students rather than 7000 yuan/month on graduate students.

Chen Tao is the human resources manager of a water treatment equipment manufacturing enterprise under a large state-owned enterprise. Wang Jian, who has been in contact with manufacturing companies for a long time, has observed that in recent years, the degree competition among fresh graduates has intensified, and the proportion and quantity of graduate resumes that companies can receive have rapidly increased; However, even so, companies still tend to recruit undergraduate graduates with lower salary expectations.

In Chen Tao's company, fresh graduates need to undergo grassroots "shift style" training before gradually developing towards technical personnel and factory managers.

He said that currently, companies are more willing to recruit employees who are "recruited and used", but it is difficult for both graduate and undergraduate students to "recruit and use". However, in comparison, undergraduate students have lower psychological expectations and mobility.

Zhang Qing's listed company also has a similar phenomenon. In this company, even fresh graduates who plan to train as design engineers need to rotate in production, mold and other departments and pass the assessment before they can go to the corresponding departments.

Zhang Qing said that the biggest weakness of fresh graduates is that there is a certain disconnect between the knowledge they have learned and the actual job requirements. Anyway, it's better for companies to re teach than to directly hire cheaper undergraduate students

Zhang Qing calculated that graduate students majoring in vehicle engineering at a certain university usually expect a monthly salary of 10000 yuan. Even if the expected salary is lowered to 8000 yuan per month, the motivation for companies to hire them is very limited. By contrast, companies can typically hire a bachelor's degree graduate with a monthly salary of 6000-7000 yuan.

He believes that "undergraduate graduates often have higher execution ability, while master's students will have more ideas of their own. In most positions in the manufacturing industry, what companies need most is execution ability, not employees with subjective consciousness

In the process of long-term contact with manufacturing enterprises, Wang Jian observed that in order to achieve "call and use", the introductory training cycle of manufacturing enterprises is also constantly being compressed. The most typical example is that some factories in the Pearl River Delta region compress the time for "new workers" from entry to work into a few hours: through "teaching three exercises and four forms", each position action is broken down to key points, and with the help of dedicated skill teachers, hands-on teaching and on-site assessment, a worker can go from scratch to step onto the production line in just a few hours.

Wang Jian stated that there is a shortage of over ten million senior technicians in the manufacturing industry, which means that manufacturing companies are not lacking "people with diplomas", but "people who can directly solve specific process problems". The cultivation path of undergraduate education generally leans towards theory and general knowledge, which naturally deviates from the "combat readiness" requirements of the production line.

The manufacturing industry tends to attract employees who are ready to use, which is also reflected in the macro data of recruitment platforms. According to data from the Zhilian Recruitment Platform, in the first half of 2026, the proportion of recruitment for "no experience/no experience" positions in the manufacturing industry decreased from 24.8% in the same period last year to 22.3%, a decrease of 2.5 percentage points; The proportion of positions requiring 3 to 5 years of experience has increased from 26.2% to 27.9%, an increase of 1.7 percentage points.

Li Qiang stated that the above-mentioned changes are not drastic, but the direction is clear: the manufacturing industry's social recruitment is shifting from "recruiting and training" to "recruiting and getting started".

By late September, Zhang Qing had sent messages to the relatives and friends behind the more than 20 resumes, and his response was concise and to the point - the company tried to help arrange work, but the position was not necessarily satisfactory.

He said, "If job seekers don't choose, we can still arrange positions for them, otherwise we are powerless. If job seekers only have a bachelor's degree, there is very little room for them to choose positions

Basic positions are quietly disappearing

In recent years, at the request of the group level, Chen Tao has been recruiting a certain number of fresh graduates every year, but the overall personnel size of the company is still shrinking, and intelligent equipment is gradually replacing some basic workers in the factory.

Chen Tao's company produces both sewage treatment equipment and operates sewage treatment plants. In the past few years, Chen Tao's company has invested heavily in the intelligent transformation and upgrading of sewage treatment equipment. And intelligent upgrading is like an 'invisible big hand', screening out positions that can be replaced in factories. Every time the level of device intelligence is upgraded, this' invisible big hand 'is screened once.

In the scene of salvaging floating slag and cleaning moss in sewage treatment plants, the previously required operators have been replaced by machines. At present, the company is piloting the reduction and unmanned operation and management of sewage treatment plants, which means that the company was once regarded as an indispensable on-site operation position, and its scale is likely to be further reduced in the coming years.

In recent years, China's manufacturing industry has accelerated its transformation and upgrading. In 2025, the new driving force index of China's economic development will increase by 12.5% compared to the previous year. During this process, different job demands also fluctuate accordingly.

Li Qiang stated that compared to the first half of 2025, the areas where the number of internal recruitment in the manufacturing industry will increase in the first half of 2026 are mainly concentrated in some advanced manufacturing industries, such as robotics, new materials, aerospace, specialized equipment manufacturing, industrial automation, etc. This differentiation is essentially a natural result of the upgrading of the manufacturing industry - the demand for talent is shifting from labor-intensive processes to technology intensive, high value-added processes. For job seekers, the entrance to the advanced manufacturing track is widening, while the competitive logic of traditional manufacturing positions is being redefined.

Wang Jian also observed that traditional labor-intensive positions are experiencing structural contraction. A typical example is that after the penetration rate of new energy vehicles exceeded 60%, the "three electric system" gradually replaced the mechanical structure of fuel vehicles, and maintenance workers who only know how to repair fuel vehicles have completely lost their experience and are facing the dilemma of being eliminated. At the same time, AI visual inspection technology can accurately identify small defects with an efficiency 3 to 5 times that of manual labor, and the demand for basic quality inspection positions is also significantly reduced. But this contraction does not necessarily equate to unemployment - many companies will embed surplus workers into the design and debugging process of new production lines, and achieve transformation through short-term training. For example, steel plant operators can transform into industrial robot operation and maintenance technicians through short-term training.

Between the transformation of old and new driving forces in the manufacturing industry, Du Qi is concerned that the number of jobs replaced in the short term will far exceed the number of jobs created by intelligent transformation, and some older and unskilled workers may be forced to withdraw from the manufacturing industry.

Du Qi has calculated that if the second phase of the company's planned project adopts intelligent equipment, the daily labor demand of the new factory will be reduced from more than 700 to about 200, and the production capacity of the new factory will be four times that of the original factory. The product quality will also be more controllable.

However, Du Qi's company has yet to advance the construction of the second phase factory and the intelligent transformation of the first phase factory.

He said, "I believe all manufacturing business owners are aware of the benefits of intelligent transformation, but in practice, they often face multiple constraints. For example, in recent years, many manufacturing companies have faced survival crises and are unable to allocate additional funds for intelligent transformation. Once intelligent manufacturing is completed, how to digest the doubled production capacity and how to place 600 employees will be huge challenges

Looking ahead to the future, Wang Jian stated that with the rapid development of the manufacturing industry, the replacement of pure execution positions by manufacturing automation will expand from some positions to more stages. Jobs that have already been partially replaced, such as welding, quality inspection, and sorting, will further shrink, and more links will be included in the scope of replacement, such as basic assembly and simple handling. But the positions that require people to be present to handle exceptions will not disappear, but will remain strong due to continuous shortage of personnel, and the differentiation of skill thresholds will have finer granularity than industry differentiation.

The mismatch between supply and demand still exists

On the one hand, enterprises are reducing the demand for employment of some fresh graduates, while on the other hand, they deeply feel that it is difficult to recruit young people for basic positions. Zhang Qing observed during the recruitment process that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit young people to work in basic positions in factories, and companies are forced to lower their employment standards. "Companies need to first solve whether they have it, and then solve whether it is good or not," he said

Overall, the manufacturing industry remains an important force in absorbing employment opportunities for fresh graduates.

The "Monitoring and Survey Report on Migrant Workers" released by the National Bureau of Statistics over the years shows that in the past decade, the employment absorption in the manufacturing industry has shown a trend of first decreasing and then increasing, with a turning point occurring in 2021. From 2021 to 2025, the number of migrant workers absorbed by the manufacturing industry will increase by over 5.6 million. According to data previously released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, there will be a shortage of nearly 30 million talents in the top ten key areas of manufacturing in 2024, including a shortage of 22 million senior technicians.

Under the huge market demand, Wang Jian's observation is that many undergraduate students still have psychological barriers to entering factories, and frontline positions in the manufacturing industry are often labeled as "dirty and tiring". Even if recruited, the retention rate is still a big problem. Young people have a low acceptance of frontline positions in the manufacturing industry, and the combination of "two shifts" and harsh environments poses risks of personnel turnover and aging in the industry.

Li Qiang said that the core of the shortage of traditional manufacturing jobs and the difficulty of finding jobs for undergraduate students is not the lack of positions, but the mismatch between job expectations and job prospects.There are several reasons for this mismatch: firstly, there is a preference for career expectations. Undergraduate students tend to prefer functional and research and development positions, believing that these positions are "dignified, stable, and have development"; Secondly, some job seekers' impression of manufacturing positions still remains at the traditional level of "assembly line, shift work, and poor environment", and their understanding of technical positions such as equipment operation and maintenance, process debugging, and digital management that have already emerged in intelligent manufacturing enterprises is insufficient; Thirdly, there is still a gap between the salary, working environment, and promotion channels of frontline positions in the manufacturing industry and the expectations of young people, which needs to be gradually narrowed through industrial upgrading and enterprise management optimization.

In addition to the wishes of fresh graduates themselves, there is also a certain degree of disconnect between undergraduate education and the actual needs of the manufacturing industry.

Wang Jian stated that there is currently an oversupply of graduates in liberal arts majors, while graduates in science and engineering are relatively in short supply. But even in the fields of science and engineering, the specific subdivision direction may not necessarily match the actual needs of the manufacturing industry - for example, undergraduate students studying automation may have a solid theoretical foundation, but have almost zero practical experience in specific production line equipment and process parameters, and companies need to retrain them.

Li Qiang observed that in recent years, a large number of large manufacturing enterprises have promoted school enterprise cooperation with colleges and universities, with the core goal of shifting the starting point of recruitment and training from the graduation season to the school stage, so that there is no longer a gap between "learning" and "application". Under the traditional model, new employees need more than 6 months of pre job training from onboarding to independent employment. However, students in order classes trained through school enterprise cooperation can quickly start working upon onboarding.

In order to achieve technological inheritance, Du Qi has been recruiting more than 10 fresh graduates every year for the past decade. But faced with the current business difficulties, Du Qi began to measure the proportion of labor outsourcing in the company, which can not only meet short-term production needs, but also reduce the training, social security and other costs of the enterprise.

In the past few years, the proportion of labor outsourcing workers in his company was about 20%. One of the reasons why the proportion has not increased is that he believes that labor outsourcing employees often have a very low sense of identification with the company, and companies need to bear the potential changes in product production, processes, and corporate atmosphere brought about by labor outsourcing.

He said that in the past, manufacturing technicians advocated the spirit of craftsmanship and relied on the apprenticeship system to complete the inheritance of skills. If a company continues to increase the proportion of labor outsourcing and does not attach importance to the training of new employees in order to pursue short-term business results, it will be difficult to form a stable accumulation of technology and experience in the long run. In manufacturing enterprises, the proportion of hardworking, capable, and mentally unstable employees generally follows a normal distribution. The labor outsourcing model breaks this pattern, and I am very concerned about it

(At the request of the interviewer, Zhang Qing, Du Qi, and Chen Tao are pseudonyms in the article)

(Authors Tian Jin and Du Tao)