Based on the scale of job recruitment advertisements in newspapers, job fairs, online job recruitment, and head-hunting, the size of China's job recruitment market grew by almost 9 per cent year-on-year in 2004, with a total revenue of 4.16 billion yuan (US$502 million). It is estimated that this will grow to 5.12 billion yuan (US$618 million) in 2006 with an average annual growth rate of 10 per cent in 2005 and 2006.
In the job recruitment market in 2004, newspaper advertisement accounted for 50.7 per cent, followed by job fairs. Online recruitment only took 13.2 per cent of the total, which also shows the huge potential that exists.
Among these different means of recruitment, newspaper advertisement is the biggest one. Recruitment and training advertisements accounted for about 11 per cent of the total classified newspaper advertisements.Chinese newspapers' advertising revenues were 24.3 billion yuan (US$2.93 billion) in 2003 and 29.16 billion yuan (US$3.52 billion) in 2004.
The revenue from the online recruitment market was 310 million yuan (US$37.44 million) in 2003 and 550 million yuan (US$66.43 million) in 2004, while its proportion in the overall job recruitment rose from 8.1 per cent to 13.2 per cent over the same period.
Of course, compared with the growth of this sector in some developed countries, the ratio is not big enough. In the future, it is believed that the ratio will rise to between 60 and 70 per cent, so online recruitment is an area that deserves due attention from investors.
Online recruitment websites have made substantial progress since they first appeared in 1999. In the past five years, thousands of job recruitment websites have been established, attracting over 600 million visits and becoming increasingly professional.
Due to differences of development levels in different regions, the quality of talent, concepts of talent, and demands of human resources services all differ. The major means of recruitment include newspaper advertisements, websites, job fairs, head-hunting, and human resources agencies.
The size of China's job recruitment market has continued to grow along with the increased recognition of the concept of talent and the fact that the overwhelming majority of enterprises are willing to invest heavily to get high-quality staff.
In China, only 42 out of the 100 biggest enterprises have websites with the function of recruitment and 15 enterprises do not even have websites.
At present, online recruitment usually happens in the information technology, computer hardware and software, network industries, and other newly emerging service sectors.
With the popularity of the Internet, its convenience and low cost, online recruitment will be used by more enterprises and employers.
According to research conducted by iResearch, the scale of China's online recruitment market stands at about 550 million yuan (US$66.43 million) and will reach 1.69 billion yuan (US$129 million) in 2006, with an average annual growth rate of 73.9 per cent.
The information technology industry was the first one to take advantage of online recruitment. With the development of online recruitment, more and more traditional industries realized its benefits.
According to the 2004 51job index, information technology/Internet, manufacturing, biotechnology/medicine/healthcare, durable consumer product manufacturing, electronics, trade, consulting, consumer goods, advertising, real estate and its agencies are the top job recruiters on the Internet.
The iResearch statistics showed that about 800,000 enterprises published recruitment advertisements on the web.
According to the firm's third survey, 10.97 per cent of enterprises which published recruitment advertisements on the Internet are based in
Beijing and 8.25 per cent in Shanghai. And 46.6 per cent of the companies are based in northern and eastern China.
From the selection of the most frequently used applications on the Internet, the proportion of netizens who use the Internet to find jobs rose from 1 per cent to 4.7 per cent in 2003 and 3.9 per cent in 2004.
The number of users also grew from 1.19 million in 2002 to 4.1 million in 2004, which is estimated to reach 8.65 million.
This article is based on
Shanghai iResearch Co Ltd's report on China's online recruitment market in 2004, published early last month.
