Employment outlook weakens for H2

An overseas Chinese student looks around in 2013 graduate job fair held in Shanghai International Exhibition Center. Prospects for college graduates' employment is set to be grim in the coming months of the year, said experts. [Photo / China Daily]

Chinese employers' hiring intentions will weaken in the second half of 2013 but the employment rate is not a problem yet in China, human resources agencies said.

"China's net employment outlook slipped to its weakest level since the first quarter of 2010 after employer hiring plans fell in all industry sectors and all regions," Manpower Group, a global workforce provider, said in its employment outlook survey for the third quarter of 2013.

The firm uses its net employment outlook to describe employers' hiring intentions.

The Chinese mainland's net employment outlook is 12 percent in the third quarter of 2013, declining by 5 percentage points compared with the same period of 2012, Manpower said in its report.

Statistics from the survey show that 14 percent of the employers expect to increase payrolls in the third quarter, 2 percent anticipate a decrease and 45 percent forecast no change.

Zhaopin.com, one of China's largest providers of human resource services, said recruitment growth in the first half of 2013 was 20 percent, falling by 6 percentage points compared with 2012.

The job supply is related to the country's gross domestic product growth so as China's GDP growth slows down, so does employment, experts said.

Some institutions have different opinions on China's GDP growth in the second half of the year. Nomura Securities - the most pessimistic, forecast as much as a 30 percent possibility that China's GDP growth will fall below 7 percent in the second half of the year.

However, China's employment market is still steady because the workforce supply is declining alongside falling demand.

"China's employment market will be steady in the short term because China's working-age population is also reducing," said Du Yang, a professor with the institute of population and labor economics at China Academy of Social Sciences.