The logic of recruiting fresh graduates in the manufacturing industry has changed.
The campus recruitment demand of manufacturing enterprises is highly correlated with the number of new orders. Factors such as order cuts by overseas customers, increased tariffs, and sharp exchange rate fluctuations will push enterprises to shift from "expanding recruitment" to "freezing recruitment" within a few months.
During the "Golden September and Silver October" recruitment season, more than 20 resumes forwarded by relatives and friends have accumulated in Zhang Qing's WeChat, asking him to help refer a job. This is a situation Zhang Qing has never encountered in previous years.
Zhang Qing is a senior executive of a listed manufacturing company. Every mid-September, he starts to work on the company's budget report for the next year — revenue, profit, headcount scale, equipment investment and other indicators will be comprehensively considered. By December, the personnel plan and investment plan for the next year will be finalized. In this year's budget report, the number of campus recruitment quotas for fresh graduates in 2027 will most likely be reduced to half of the previous years.
This recruitment cut is a contraction based on a high base. In the past few years, Zhang Qing's enterprise has issued 100 to 200 offers (enterprise employment notices) to fresh graduates of junior college and undergraduate programs, and at the same time recruited nearly 200 additional graduates with secondary vocational school education for basic positions. He said that this scale is difficult to sustain, and now enterprises rarely recruit even regular full-time contract workers.
In addition to fluctuations in business operations and intensifying competition, the recent layoff controversy targeting fresh graduates at Xingyu Co., Ltd. is also one of the important reasons for enterprises to cut expenditures on fresh graduates. Zhang Qing said that in the past, government departments would encourage key enterprises to recruit fresh graduates, so enterprises had certain incentives to do so. However, after the Xingyu layoff controversy, manufacturing enterprises will evaluate the potential risks of campus recruitment more cautiously.
Li Qiang, Vice President of Zhaopin, introduced that campus recruitment usually starts preparation half a year to one year in advance. Leading manufacturing enterprises generally arrange the early batch in July and August, the official autumn recruitment is concentrated from September to November, and the spring recruitment supplementary recruitment is carried out from January to April of the next year. Different from social recruitment that values immediate work ability and is willing to pay for experience, enterprises value long-term potential when conducting campus recruitment and are willing to spend time training new employees.
Information from recruitment platforms such as 51job, Career International and Zhaopin shows that manufacturing enterprises have presented new characteristics in the employment demand for fresh graduates: "involution" forces manufacturing enterprises to adjust their demand for fresh graduates and ordinary workers, and manufacturing enterprises are more willing to recruit employees who can "start working immediately after being hired"; a large number of basic positions that could previously recruit junior college and undergraduate fresh graduates are being replaced by intelligent equipment.
Recruitment Cuts Amid Fluctuating Net Profit
In the past month, Du Qi has given more than 700 employees in the factory the longest holiday in the company's history, from September 25 to after the National Day holiday.
Du Qi is the deputy general manager of a large tire manufacturing enterprise, mainly in charge of human resources and other related work. The company he works for has been rated as one of the top ten outstanding private enterprises in the local area. According to his understanding, in the same industry, two leading tire manufacturers started their holidays two days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the resumption time after the National Day holiday has not yet been determined. Many small and medium-sized tire manufacturers in a major tire manufacturing province have started long holidays since September 15.
Giving employees long holidays is not a simple welfare measure, but a forced move for the company to enter a semi-shutdown state. He said the company does not rule out continuing to implement the semi-shutdown strategy in November and December, that is, the factory only operates for about 20 days per month.
In recent years, under the influence of global trade frictions, Du Qi's company has lost a considerable number of stable orders from large European and American customers. Although the enterprise has been trying to make up for the gap through entrepôt trade and increasing exports to South America and the Middle East, it is still difficult to make up for the loss 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 round of continuous high growth, leading to a continuous decline in the profit margin of the enterprise.
He said that the tire manufacturing industry has now become a "shura field" of fierce competition. When the enterprise has entered such an operating state, it is difficult to continue to invest energy in recruiting fresh graduates and expand the scale of employment.
Macroeconomic data shows that the scissors gap between raw material prices and ex-factory prices superimposed on the contradiction between supply and demand jointly compresses profit margins, which is becoming a major dilemma faced by a large number of manufacturing enterprises.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China shows that from March to June 2026, the scissors gap between the year-on-year growth rates of CPI and PPI widened for four consecutive months, and remained at 3 percentage points in the following two months.
Zhang Lin, Vice President of the Far East Credit Research Institute, said that the large scissors gap between PPI and CPI reflects that profit distribution presents a pattern of "hot upstream and cold downstream": in a cost-push inflation environment, new profits are mainly concentrated in the upstream resource industry, while the profits of the midstream and downstream manufacturing and consumer goods sectors are continuously squeezed, which easily makes midstream and downstream enterprises fall into the situation of "increasing revenue without increasing profit".
Fluctuations in net profit are usually transmitted to the recruitment end within 1 to 2 quarters. Wang Jian, a senior workplace consultant at 51job, observed that the campus recruitment demand of manufacturing enterprises is highly correlated with the number of new orders. Factors such as order cuts by overseas customers, increased tariffs, and sharp exchange rate fluctuations will push enterprises to shift from "expanding recruitment" to "freezing recruitment" within a few months.
Wang Jian said that in addition to factors on the external demand side, if the enterprise is in a cycle of overcapacity and destocking, and the overall operating rate of the industry declines, the enterprise will give priority to digesting the existing production capacity, and campus recruitment will naturally be tightened. If the commissioning plan of new factories and new production lines is delayed, the previously reserved campus recruitment quotas for this purpose in that year will also be directly cut. Many of these positions are set to "match production capacity" rather than "match existing business".
Data from 51job shows that the campus recruitment demand in the manufacturing industry has experienced cyclical fluctuations in the past ten years. For example, from 2018 to 2019, under the influence of trade frictions, export-oriented manufacturing industries were under pressure, and industries with high foreign trade dependence significantly tightened their employment demand, including directly suspending campus recruitment; from the second half of 2020 to 2021, against the background of limited overseas production capacity, China's exports rose against the trend to "fill the gap", and the recruitment of related enterprises was obviously prosperous, especially in industries such as electronics, home appliances and mechanical OEM, the recruitment demand was particularly strong.
In June 2026, 51job released the *2026 Campus Recruitment White Paper*, which shows that between 2020 and 2025, the total number of campus recruitment positions for fresh graduates has experienced staged changes of "expansion — peak — callback — stabilization". Taking the number of valid positions released in 2020 as the base 1, the figures in 2021 and 2022 were 1.14 and 1.33 respectively, while both 2024 and 2025 were only 0.79, and the campus recruitment demand has shrunk by about 40% compared with the peak period.
Actively Recruiting Undergraduates With Lower Recruitment Costs
When recruiting fresh graduates, "rather than spending 7,000 yuan per month to recruit a postgraduate, we would rather spend 5,000 yuan per month to recruit an undergraduate" has become one of Chen Tao's work experiences.
Chen Tao is the head of human resources of a water treatment equipment manufacturing enterprise under a large state-owned enterprise. Wang Jian, who has long been in contact with manufacturing enterprises, observed that in recent years, the "involution" of fresh graduates' academic qualifications has intensified, and the proportion and number of postgraduate resumes the company can receive have increased rapidly; but even so, the company still tends to recruit undergraduate graduates with lower salary expectations.
In Chen Tao's company, all fresh graduates need to go through grassroots "shift-based" training, and then gradually develop in the direction of technicians and factory directors.
He said that at present, enterprises are more willing to recruit employees who can "start working immediately after being hired", but neither postgraduates nor undergraduates can do so. However, in comparison, undergraduates have lower psychological expectations and lower mobility.
The listed company where Zhang Qing works also has a similar phenomenon. In this enterprise, even fresh graduates who are planned to be trained as design engineers need to rotate in production, mold and other departments, and can only go to the corresponding departments after passing the assessment.
Zhang Qing said that the biggest shortcoming of fresh graduates is that there is a certain disconnect between the knowledge they have learned and the actual job requirements. "Since the enterprise has to re-teach them anyway, it is better to directly hire cheaper undergraduates."
Zhang Qing did the math: a postgraduate graduating from the vehicle engineering major of a certain university usually expects a monthly salary of 10,000 yuan, and even if the expected salary is reduced to 8,000 yuan per month, the enterprise has very limited motivation to hire him. By contrast, the enterprise can usually recruit an undergraduate graduate with a monthly salary of 6,000 to 7,000 yuan.
He believes: "Undergraduates often have higher execution ability, while postgraduates have more of their own ideas. In most positions in the manufacturing industry, what enterprises need most is execution ability, rather than employees with subjective consciousness."
In the process of long-term contact with manufacturing enterprises, Wang Jian observed that in order to achieve "immediate availability after recruitment", the entry training cycle for new employees in manufacturing enterprises is also constantly being compressed. The most typical example is that some factories in the Pearl River Delta have compressed the time from new workers' entry to on-duty to several hours: through the "three teachings and four practices form", the movements of each position are broken down to key points, combined with full-time skill teachers' one-on-one teaching and on-site assessment, a worker can go from zero foundation to the production line, and the fastest time only takes a few hours.
Wang Jian said that the gap of senior skilled workers in the manufacturing industry exceeds 10 million, which means that what manufacturing enterprises lack is not "people with diplomas", but "people who can directly solve specific process problems". The training path of undergraduate education is generally theoretical and general, which has a natural mismatch with the "immediate combat power" requirement of the production line.
The manufacturing industry's preference for employees who can "start working immediately after being hired" is also reflected in the macro data of recruitment platforms. Data from Zhaopin shows that in the first half of 2026, the proportion of recruitment for positions with "no experience required" in the manufacturing industry dropped from 24.8% in the same period of last year to 22.3%, a decrease of 2.5 percentage points; while the proportion of positions requiring 3 to 5 years of experience rose from 26.2% to 27.9%, an increase of 1.7 percentage points.
Li Qiang said that the above change range is not drastic, but the direction is very clear: the social recruitment of the manufacturing industry is tilting from "recruit and then train" to "recruit and start working immediately".
By the end of late September, Zhang Qing successively sent messages to the relatives and friends behind the more than 20 resumes, and his reply was concise — the enterprise will try its best to help arrange jobs, but the positions may not be satisfactory.
He said: "If job seekers are not picky, we can still arrange positions for them, otherwise we can't do anything. If job seekers only have a bachelor's degree, there is very little room for them to choose positions."
Basic Positions Are Disappearing Quietly
In recent years, in response to the requirements of the group level, Chen Tao recruits a certain number of fresh graduates every year, but the overall headcount of the company is still shrinking, and intelligent equipment is gradually replacing some basic workers in the factory.
Chen Tao's company not only produces sewage treatment equipment, but also operates sewage treatment plants. In the past few years, Chen Tao's company has invested a lot of money in the intelligent transformation and upgrading of sewage treatment equipment. The intelligent upgrading is like an "invisible big hand", which screens out the positions that can be replaced in the factory. Every time the intelligence level of the equipment is upgraded, this "invisible big hand" will screen once.
In the scenarios of scooping up scum and cleaning moss in the sewage treatment plant, the original operators needed have been replaced by machines. At present, the company is piloting the less-manned and unmanned operation and management of sewage treatment plants, which means that the on-site operation positions that were once regarded as indispensable in the company will most likely be further reduced in scale in the next few years.
In recent years, China's manufacturing industry has accelerated transformation and upgrading. In 2025, China's new economic development momentum index increased by 12.5% over the previous year. In this process, the demand for different positions has also fluctuated accordingly.
Li Qiang said that compared with the first half of 2025, the fields with rising number of internal recruitment in the manufacturing industry in the first half of 2026 are mainly concentrated in some advanced manufacturing industries, such as robotics, new materials, aerospace, special equipment manufacturing, industrial automation and other industries. This differentiation is essentially the natural result of manufacturing upgrading — the demand for talents is concentrating from labor-intensive links to technology-intensive and high value-added links. For job seekers, the entry of the advanced manufacturing track is widening, and the competition 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 exceeds 60%, the "three-electric system" gradually replaces the mechanical structure of fuel vehicles, and the experience of maintenance workers who only know how to repair fuel vehicles is completely invalid, and they are facing the dilemma of being eliminated. At the same time, AI visual inspection technology can accurately identify tiny defects, with an efficiency 3 to 5 times that of manual labor, and the demand for basic quality inspection positions is also greatly reduced. However, this contraction does not mean unemployment — many enterprises will embed redundant workers into the design and commissioning links of new production lines to achieve transformation through short-term training. For example, steel plant operators can be transformed into industrial robot operation and maintenance technicians through short-term training.
Between the transformation of new and old kinetic energy in the manufacturing industry, what Du Qi worries about is that the number of positions replaced in the short term is far greater than the number of positions created by intelligent transformation, and some older workers with insufficient skills may be forced to withdraw from the manufacturing industry.
Du Qi calculated that if the second-phase project planned by the company adopts intelligent equipment, the daily employment demand of the new factory will be reduced from more than 700 to about 200, the production capacity of the new factory will be four times that of the original factory, and the product quality will be more controllable.
However, Du Qi's company has not yet promoted 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 there are often multiple constraints in actual promotion. For example, in recent years, many manufacturing enterprises have faced survival crises and cannot afford additional funds for intelligent transformation; once intelligent manufacturing is completed, how to digest the doubled production capacity and how to resettle 600 employees will be huge challenges."
Looking to the future, Wang Jian said 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 links. Positions that have 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. However, positions that "require people to be present to handle exceptions" will not disappear. On the contrary, they will remain stable due to continuous shortage of personnel, and the differentiation of skill thresholds will have a finer granularity than industry differentiation.
Mismatch Between Supply and Demand Still Exists
On the one hand, enterprises are reducing the employment demand for some fresh graduates, on the other hand, they find it difficult to recruit young people for basic positions. Zhang Qing observed during the recruitment process that it is increasingly difficult to recruit young people to work in basic positions in factories, and enterprises are forced to lower employment standards. "Enterprises need to solve the problem of 'whether we have enough people' first, and then solve the problem of 'whether the people are good enough'."
On the whole, the manufacturing industry is still an important force absorbing the employment of fresh graduates.
The *Migrant Worker Monitoring and Survey Report* released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China over the years shows that in the past ten years, the employment absorption of the manufacturing industry has shown a trend of first decreasing and then rising, and the turning point occurred in 2021. From 2021