It is spring job fair season and the crowd is not flocking to the usual names.
Why?
Because AI is stealing the show.
So what does that leave students with?
A job market that's rewriting the rules before they even walk in the door.
But how does one show up ready when nobody's quite sure what ready really means?
After that, time to step up to the soapbox.
Every week we find a story from the news that got a little under our skin.
We lay out the facts and then tell you exactly how we feel about it.
No holding back.
Coming to you live from our studios in Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm Steve.
Thank you very much for being with us today.
And for the show, I'm with Yushan and Xinyu.
First up.
Spring recruitment season is here.
I imagine a very exciting and stressful time for the job seekers.
Campuses are buzzing, job fairs are packed, and resumes are flying.
But this year, the hottest draw isn't finance or marketing, it's AI.
From generative AI startups to tech giants, artificial intelligence has become the undisputed star of the job fair circuit.
So what does this mean for the students?
The question is no longer just what's your major?
It's now, how do you work with AI?
Roles are being reshaped overnight and new ones are emerging just as fast.
For those students, being AI ready means learning to leverage the tools, understanding the ethics that's important, of course and doubling down on the human skills that technology can't replace, or maybe I should say can't replace yet.
As spring recruitment unfolds, the future of work is here and it's asking students to step up.
I guess the big question, Yusheng and Xinyu, is are the students ready?
I think I was right.
Yes, very exciting time.
Very nerve wracking time as well.
Exactly.
It is one of the most important time that students are starting to think about their future, or maybe future, maybe starting to get into the circle of society.
And spring recruitment is one of the two major hiring seasons each year, typically taking place from February to April, and it comes right after the Chinese New Year, when companies finalize their annual hiring plans and reopen recruitment.
And that's what they call it.
Hat count, maybe.
Yeah.
And then, during this period, both fresh graduates and some experienced job seekers actively enter the market, making it a highly competitive and fast paced hiring window, because students graduate students are thinking about OK, now it is the time that I am actually giving out my resumes and see what is response.
And then also companies are also having high hopes on what they're hiring.
It's not the only time of year for recruitment, right?
To a lot of people, because there's an autumn recruitment time.
But this time, the spring recruitment time, is this kind of seen as the it's never fair to say the last chance, but at least the last chance for this particular period of time.
Is that how students and job seekers would view it?
Or the second chance?
Maybe because the autumn recruitment season is always seen as the golden period for these students who are about to graduate the next year to find or secure a job?
But for those who haven't found a job, then this spring season can be your second chance.
So it's focuses more on feeling like remaining vacancies.
And for some companies, they're adjusting hiring needs.
And we have seen cities and universities.
They host major offline job fairs, which I have visited before, right before I was about to graduate.
So like many of these about to graduates, I circled around the booths of many companies.
They are delivering their pamphlets, They're doing their advertisements to recruit, like these about who are about to graduate.
So is that is that kind of the extent of a job fair in China?
Then you go and I'm assuming it's really really, really crowded, and then there's booths, kind of like a market in a sense.
Is there any interaction with hiring managers or anything like that?
Or are you simply just taking information and delivering resumes?
Or are you even giving your resume at that point?
Yeah, you can give your resumes to these HR staff there for each company, or you can talk to them.
Ask about some of the like, what kind of requirements they have for this particular position.
So that's kind of a window for graduates to have, like this communication with their uh, the companies they want to go.
It must be really competitive yushin, because if there are so many people there, you know there's only what i guess a couple of people at each booth, not an entire staff.
So competing even just to get a word from with or talk with the people at the booths must be really hard to do.
It kind of depends, I think.
And because that is maybe only one form of the spring recruitment getting into like companies, getting into the campus and having that kind of affair.
And then some other maybe municipal level job fairs will also hold in some other convention centers.
And then students are about to graduate, students can go to these places and maybe give out resumes and maybe even get a direct interview with their boss, you know, because it is kind of also a trend recently in China.
I guess they would be advertising.
These recruiters would be advertising through online platforms as well.
So if you've got the job fairs, you've got the campus events, you've got the interviews, you've got the online platforms, then that means that there are a number of jet different ways that that job seekers can access the information.
But it also means that a whole lotta positions maybe thousands of positions could be released within a short period, but also filled within a relatively short period as well, and i guess that's why the spring recruitment is a pretty key indicator of economic trends and maybe industry trends at the same time.
Yeah, the types of the roles being offered and the skills companies are prioritizing often reveal where the drop market is heading, and this year, for example, The surge in AI-related positions highlights how quickly the demand for tech and also digital skills is growing.
Yeah, we'll get to the spring recruitment and exactly what it looks like in just a sec.
But I saw it in the news a few days ago that the government put out a package of policy measures to promote the employment of college graduates and other young groups.
So what are some of the things that those policy measures said?
Yeah, some of the policies, such as social insurance subsidies and tax and fee reductions, should be better utilized to encourage companies to hire more college graduates.
In other words, the government is essentially using a kind of cash incentives plus tax cuts approach to lower employee years labor costs.
If a company, let's say, hires fresh graduates, And then the government provides subsidies and tax breaks on the portion of because companies need to pay the employees their social insurance.
And then the employers is required to pay.
So thereby incentivizing businesses to recruit more university graduates.
And that's, that's actually something new to me, you know, because i understand that and there's always that that that uh, spring recruitment season, autumn recruitment season companies are hiring uh, newly graduate students and i i just think it as a just a norm that is happening in the industry.
I never thought about why these companies are hiring so many newly graduates.
Yeah yeah, that makes sense.
They are incentivized to do so.
I saw in Xinhua that China is looking to keep the surveyed urban unemployment rated around five and a half percent.
They're looking to create more than 12 million new urban jobs this year.
That's according to this year's government work report.
So lots and lots and lots of positions to be filled.
All right.
So let's get to the season this time.
Spring recruitment.
What does it look like?
Yeah.
So it has already happened in major Chinese cities such as Beijing.
On March the 14th, the city launched its first large spring job fair of 2026, so it brought together over 480 companies and 20000 job openings.
And I read the news.
It says the the job fair received like 18000 resumes at the scene and also 9000 resumes from online, so that's like 27000 resumes for 20000 job openings.
That competition is really fierce.
And also in Hangzhou they have this youth talent fair that attracted 1200 high-quality companies that offer more than 30000 positions.
Also in Guangzhou, they have a large-scale recruitment event that opened on March the 15th and it released over 85000 jobs in two days.
So that's also record high for the city as well.
And we have seen that this notable feature of this year is, like you should mention, the rise of AI-related positions.
For instance, in Hangzhou, the AI industry recorded a 55 month-on-month growth rate, ranking first among all sectors.
Yeah, that's what I was saying when we got started that AI is finally showing its teeth, if you will, in job markets and in job postings too, in job descriptions.
And of course we shouldn't be surprised to know that big tech companies are leading this charge in the AI talent hunt.
Alibaba would be an example, Tencent, J.D., Baidu, Meituan, ByteDance, all the big names, right?
And some of these positions that are on offer, the salary is exceptional.
I mean kind of expected these high-tech companies will offer a huge amount of sellers, but I didn't expect this to be this high.
Core AI positions can now reach sellers of up to around 80000 yuan, or that's around 11000 US dollars per month.
Per month, not per year, per month.
Yes, per month.
And I've also checked some of the news reports, domestic media, the paper that I see and reviewed over 10000 job postings from these major tech companies, such as Tencent and ByteDance, and found that 47 of positions require AI-related skills.
That's kind of a penetration rate of all of the AI-related jobs in their postings.
And one example is at Tencent, 56 of recruitment positions mentioned ai.
So that means ai is is not just like a pretty bonus that you can have on your resume now yeah, this is a requirement, or basic, Getting more basic like you need to have these AI skills.
Just like in the past, on our resumes, we would write office skills.
Nowadays, you have to switch that to AI skills.
I can type 47 words a minute.
Maybe not so important anymore.
So we can see that how AI has just become more indispensable in terms of this job market.
For instance, like the humanoid robot leader Unitree, it conducted its first massive offline expansion for sales talent and it received nearly 100 resumes in just one hour.
And I checked that salary.
It offers a minimum of 20000 to 30000 yuan per month and a maximum of 50000 to 60000 yuan per month.
That would depend on your skills, I guess.
Yes, so the more AI capabilities that you have, the higher salaries you'll get once you get into the company.
I'm still a little confused, might be the word because when we see this type of topic And we say oh, AI skills are necessary.
What does that mean?
I'm sure that that's probably quite confusing for a young person, because AI is such a broad term and AI skills therefore, is such a broad term.
So how are we supposed to know? what that actually means.
I saw one of the examples.
I think it is kind of explaining what it is.
That job occupation is called quality operations.
It's probably just about quality checking and also operating on the daily basis.
And that role.
For example, it requires candidates to have a background in journalism and communication first of all, as well as the ability to write prompts.
They specifically write that requirement to write prompts.
This means the operations staff not only need strong judgment and sensitivity themselves in their field of job, but also the ability to direct AI to carry out tasks such as content moderation and also trend analysis, to have a better understanding on what is actually happening in the whole industry, or maybe online, and the trend and everything.
Even prompt writing is stated explicitly in the job description.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So I guess in the past we think AI skills as like technicians or engineers who develop these AI models.
But nowadays we can see that even those non-technical people um, they can use ai as this universal, like production tool.
You use ai to produce something that maybe for like human beings they have to take like a week to accomplish, but for ai, then you like need less time and much more productivity.
The prompts are really – you're right.
And the engineers.
We have to thank the engineers, because the engineers are the people who put the interface up there for us.
That's simple and easy to use.
But they can't pull the words out of our mouths or they can't type our keyboards for us telling us how to speak to AI.
And that's what we're talking about when we talk about prompts.
And they are really, really – important, Yuxin, aren't they?
Because if you don't know how to talk to the AI, you will not get your desired result.
The AI, in my experience, we use it every single day.
It's kind of like your smartest friend and your dumbest friend combined into one.
But to get the best results out of your friend, you have to know how to talk to them.
And if you don't, then you're going to get a jumbled mess of things, which is, by the way, insanely frustrating to do.
This reminds me of perhaps, computer literacy in the 80s or 90s or early 2000s, where if you were going for a job interview, they would want to know about your I don't know Microsoft Excel skills or stuff like that right.
That was it at that time.
And now we're talking AI skills here in 2026.
That kind of requirements that let you.
Of course, they're saying that you need to grasp the basic skills of using blah blah, blah.
Now it is switching from Microsoft software to AI chatbots or something.
Because I think, of course, as you said, the results from AI can be very, very different depending on how you give the input or the prompt, as we say.
So when we are using it very very, I think, in a way that you are actually treating it as a very, very knowledgeable human, and then it can be really knowledgeable.
If you are treating it as a basic translator, and then it will just be the role yeah um, and the language yes, ai speaks all of the languages around the world.
I guess right almost, but it needs specifically worded things in order for you to get the best result, and that's what we're talking about here.
I want to go back to that government work report, the 2026 government work report.
It specifically emphasizes the cultivation of new jobs, new occupations in emerging and future industries.
And they're doing this to promote high quality employment.
So what that means is that there's a lot of government support.
There's a lot of government investment.
You talked about subsidies and things like this offered to companies from the government, Yuxin.
On the market side.
Companies have been expanding their businesses in AI, and that also gives rise to new jobs, things that didn't even exist before.
More AI-related positions.
And as we just learned, what was that, 80,000 yuan a month?
These are often high-paying jobs and I guess the incentives are so great in the job positions because they want to get the best talent possible.
Yeah.
So these big tech companies, they're willing to pay more to hire these skilled employees with AI capabilities, such as the PwC, which is a global professional services network.
It has this AI job spirometer report.
According to this report, these roles requiring AI skills offer an average salary premium of up to 56.
And also transitioning from a traditional manager to an AI product manager can result in a 30 to 40 salary jump.
That's very temptative.
And also for these job seeking people phenomenon.
It refers to the fact that nowadays we have like more job positions for these AI related employees, but yeah the the, the demand is higher.
Yeah, the demand is higher, but we have like less talent to fill that um demand.
So um, maybe for five positions we have one like technical talent, and i think that is also why the document also emphasis on expanding job training efforts and rolling out a structured internship hiring program, and also highlights the need to build training initiatives In this fast growing sectors tied to what we call new quality protective forces, like the artificial intelligence, new energy vehicles and low altitude economy.
And I think another point I would like to mention is it also further notes that greater support will be directed toward vulnerable groups such as households on subsistence allowances, also families with no employed members and those at risk of slipping back into poverty, and unemployed graduates with disabilities.
And they are actually thinking about these vulnerable groups that may be in the very, very fierce competition that can be neglected, trying to make sure the playing field is level for everyone.
But the companies that we mentioned before this kind of just popped into my mind JD ByteDance, all the big names, Alibaba.
They're competing with each other.
Definitely.
To get these top talents.
Yeah.
And so that, yeah, I guess, what did you call it?
The job-seeking...
People.
People, right?
It's the job seeking the people, not the people seeking the jobs for the best of the best, I guess.
Fierce competition amongst those big tech companies.
Even they have some special programs.
I think Huawei has that program that will just hire the top, top talent and they will offer very, very good, astonishingly good welfare and salary and everything.
To the talent globally.
They're hiring people globally.
Not just restricted to China or the Chinese market.
What does this mean for the job market as a whole, though?
Because we touched on it just very briefly before.
The companies aren't just looking for the best computer engineers.
They're looking for what's called hybrid talent.
And this also kind of levels the playing field a little bit.
What does that mean when they say hybrid talent?
Or I can say it's a T-shaped talent in Chinese.
We often call it T-shaped, like the letter T, And the horizontal bar refers to that, you have this ability to collaborate across different fields.
You have knowledge or skills of different fields.
But then also you have this vertical bar of this one deep expertise in one area.
So for this hybrid talent too, I think many companies they are looking for those people who not only have strong expertise in their own field, but also they can understand how their skills can be applied to a different industries or a broader workflow.
So, for example, a material science expert becomes much more valuable if they can see how their work improves real products.
For instance, like sensors for brain signal detection, that's very technical.
But companies, they today prefer these learning-oriented candidates.
It refers to those who keep improving their core skills while actively exploring other fields.
Like we've mentioned, the AI, how to use AI.
Adopt AI to make your work more productive.
How to connect what you know to real world needs.
But again, you made a great point there.
It's not just about what you know, but it's how you can apply it.
It's how you can adapt, how you can continue learning and how you can create an impact, maybe even beyond your field of expertise.
That sounds stressful, doesn't it?
I mean, if I'm a young person listening to this right now, I'm thinking, OMG.
I need to know more than what I just studied in university.
I need to know AI skills, but I need to know how those skills will have an influence on products and the real world.
And I need to know the ethics of the AI.
Oh my gosh.
But I guess that's why and we talked about this before on Roundtable how universities are now offering these.
What's the term?
I forget the term where you study in your own major but then you study other things outside of your major.
Interdisciplinary?
Yeah, right.
Interdisciplinary studies.
If I'm a young person listening right now, I'm thinking okay well, interdisciplinary studies is definitely on my list of things to do.
Yeah, and I was just about to mention that because, as I said, these requirements are like, require you to have basically everything, and in Chinese people call them 六变形战士, it's called hexagon warriors, because you have all the skills points getting to the top, almost like a game.
Yeah, is it possible?
But anyway, of course, companies want these kind of talents, and then there are so many other examples that highlight, I think, the recent trend toward industrial internationalization, with language skills, especially English, becoming a more common requirement.
And one example I saw is also in the report that I mentioned in the paper, DocCN, roles such as AI search data operations require English for everyday communication.
That's one.
Model product managers are expected to have strong listening speaking, reading and writing skills in English to participate in overseas market research.
And also even audio and video engineers are now also expected to be capable of writing technical documentation in English.
Interdisciplinary studies plus language skills.
OMG.
It keeps growing and growing.
Now, here's another question, though.
For the engineering students, great.
But what about for someone like me?
I was an English major.
Are liberal arts students looked at in this new job world, in this new job market?
Is there any fear that they are going to be left behind?
Actually, there is a growing belief that these liberal arts students with AI skills they can be more competitive than those students who from science subjects because they have this strong narrative abilities that can be used to provide precise AI prompts.
We've just talked about how prompts they matter in terms of communicating with AI.
And in this sense, maybe the liberal arts students they have like better chance of communicating better with ai.
It's not that they don't need the ai skills.
They absolutely 100 do need those skills.
It's just the skills that they've learned in their own majors.
How to communicate yes, can be put to great use.
Um, so that means that companies are no longer just hiring strictly ai people to explore technology.
They want much more than that.
In the past uh, some of this big companies hired ai talent mainly to build up their technical strength and then top engineers first yeah, and then see okay um, what can we do with you with the top talents?
But now it's kind of different companies are now asking can this ai or can this skill actually help us make more money or improve our business or boost the efficiency?
So the real battlefield is now The AI plus industry.
They want these multiple functional talent.
It's not just about building a powerful model.
It's about where can you actually use your talent.
And one example is in finance, AI is used for risk control and fraud detection.
And in healthcare, AI helps with diagnosis, support, and medical data analysis.
And maybe in content platform, AI improves recommendation systems and moderation.
So a lot of these digitalized platforms, of course they requiring the AI support and also the AI, I think, talent to actually make their platforms better.
And that's why companies want people who understand not only the tech but also the industry and how the tech applies to people.
The industry um well, it sounds like this is all.
I mean.
It's all really great information, because we have to know what the companies are looking for specifically, but there are there have to be some difficulties as well, and i imagine the difficulties would exist for the companies and they would exist for the job seekers as well um, Because the jobs are being redefined, right.
New positions are being created.
That would be a challenge for companies, I would think.
For companies, yeah, sure.
I think there's this structural gap for this current change in the job market.
So, on one hand, AI is actively replacing these traditional entry-level positions, such as these junior programmers clerks, administrative assistants, But on the other hand, there's a high demand for this composite talents.
So what we call hybrid talents.
So for these professionals who can understand both AI technology and specific industry pain points.
And in terms of these companies who are hiring these AI, skilled talents.
There's also another issue of evaluation.
How can we evaluate a like an employee is doing his or her job very well with the AI technology or skills?
So that's another thing to keep in mind about the evaluation.
And also there's a scam as well for these recruitment sessions.
Yeah, recently recruitment scam is quite a big topic online.
And during this year's 2026 spring recruitment season, scams like promising guaranteed job And then internal referrals have been spreading on social media.
Yeah, because some of these jobs, these are paid, I guess, services.
Yeah, they are paid, of course, these services.
And because they guarantee you that you can get a very promising job and then maybe a very highly paid job.
And now you can you just pay me a little bit and then you can get that for a really long time.
So it is a good deal to them, but actually there could be a lot of scams within them.
So others are pushed into, like ex.
Expensive training courses that promise high success rates but actually fail to deliver real services or refunds.
And then um actually, these are basically the, the scams that people need to taken like to be careful about this, of course yeah, i mean legitimate recruitment.
Well, legitimate recruitment is free and it's very transparent too, so any job offer that requires you to pay, that should be the number one red flag.
That's not normal, right?
Uh yeah, i mean, like i said it's, it's um Something that we talk about a lot.
You know how government is adjusting, how universities are adjusting their programs, how students are adjusting their studies.
But each time there's a new job recruitment season, we get a clearer picture of the what seems to be ever-changing landscape of the job market.
Stressful, exciting, good luck.
Best of luck to all of you job seekers out there.
I hope you get the 80,000 yuan per month job that you're looking for.
But just one last point, and I think this is a cause for concern perhaps too.
You just said, Xinyu, the entry-level positions, not all, many are being eliminated, right?
When I came out of university, entry-level positions were kind of So if those are being replaced, I wonder if that raises the bar so it gets redefined and the entry level position now is even more difficult to acquire than it was before.
Meaning you need to have More skills.
Skills.
Yeah, before, if you wanted an entry-level position, everybody needs to start somewhere.
Everybody needs to get their foot in the door.
But now it seems like you need more on your resume before you can even knock on that door in the first place.
Never stop learning, right?
Never, never, never stop learning and improving yourself if you can.
