Helen Deng

WANG XIAOTIAN, a former general manager of a finance company, had a relaxed Spring Festival this year, after quitting his job and with it an annual salary of 300,000 yuan (US$38,461).

In March, Wang started to look for a new job. "So I came here to have a try," he told the Shenzhen Daily at a job fair held at the city's Intercontinental hotel last week.

Wang was one of the tens of thousands of jobseekers at the job fair Wednesday, one of the many job fairs held in the city in March.

The two months after the Spring Festival are usually regarded as the best time to look for a new job, as workers prefer to change jobs after picking up the year-end bonus and human resources departments start to implement new hiring plans.

Nearly 10,000 vacancies were on offer at the Golden Future job fair, most of which were for technical and managerial positions. Even though the organizer, Western HR, charged 10 yuan per person to control the number of visitors, the job fair site was still packed with eager jobseekers, with a long line waiting in front of the entrance all morning. There are continuous calls from the hall urging people to leave the site after leaving their resumes.

While some vacancies had plenty of applicants, not many were keen on jobs in some specialized fields. Li Mingyong, development center engineer of the TV Production Division of Konka Group, sat idle for most of the fair, because there were few applicants for the R&D jobs in the TV division.

"The more specialized the job is, the more difficult it is to find an employee," said Li. That's why although the job fair site was packed with people, some employers complained that they could not find the personnel they were looking for.

A sales director position, offered by Mission Hills Golf Club with an annual salary of 1.2 million yuan, found no takers because it required "customer resources," "at least five years' experience in marketing high-end products" and "excellent achievements in the past work."