By Zhan Lisheng

GUANGZHOU, CHINA: There is a reason for college seniors to sulk, if a recent survey is anything to go by.

According to a survey conducted by Kingfield Management (China), one of the leading headhunting service providers in the country, 65 percent of the enterprises, situated in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, have no plans to recruit fresh graduates or postgraduates this year.

A total of 216 companies were interviewed for the survey, most of which were foreign-funded, while the rest were large and medium-sized private enterprises, State-owned firms and stockholding companies. About 90 percent of these firms recruited fresh graduates last year.

"Being one of the most important manufacturing hubs in the world, Guangdong has been severely affected by the impact of the global financial crisis," Lu Fuji, chairman of Sam's Party, a venture of Kingfield Management (China), said yesterday.

"Since the manufacturing sector in the province has shrunk, it is bound to shrink the demand for manpower," he said.

He said there will be a surge of fresh graduates this year, and on top of that there are last year's graduates who have still not found a job. "It's not going to be easy for any of them this year."

Lu assured that large-scale recruitment drives, such as the one held by Country Garden, which hired 3,000 fresh graduates in 2008, "will not happen in 2009".

The survey further found that 62 percent of the firms in the region started lowering their recruitment scale in 2008.

More than 60 percent of the enterprises cut their scale by less than 10 percent, while over 20 percent of them lowered their requirement by 20 percent or more, the survey showed.

While 44 percent of the companies started laying off employees in 2008, 13 percent lowered their staff's salaries.

"Never before in the past three decades has the province seen staff reduction of such a scale," said Ren Ge, general manager of Kingfield Management.

"And it seems, more firms decided to lay off staff rather than cutting their pays to cope with the crisis," he said.

On the brighter side, the survey showed that 40 percent of the companies were still planning to give raises to their employees this year, though a majority of them - 82 percent - would offer raises of less than 10 percent. The remaining 18 percent intend to increase salaries by 11 to 20 percent.

Lin Shufan, an associate professor of human resources with South China Normal University, said the results of the survey seemed "reasonable and believable".

"In an age of economic doldrums, downsizing tends to be a common practice for an enterprise to survive," Lin said.