By Kate Yuan

The increasing number of graduates in China and IC companies’ shrinking hiring plans may make it a cruel spring recruitment season for job applicants, a JW Insight report said on January 28.

The number of university graduates is expected to reach 11.58 million in 2023, 820,000 more compared with the 10.76 million in 2022, according to China’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) in a conference on the employment and entrepreneurship of the 2023 graduates held in last November.

The severe employment situation spills over into 2023. 51job (前程无忧), a leading online recruitment company, found the semiconductor industry was most obvious in cutting hiring plans, after talks with the recruiters of 100 companies.

At the same time, the requirements for applicants will be higher than before. Several IC companies told JW Insights they would continue to recruit in spring, but did not reveal the scale, or implicitly stated that they would narrow their plans.

Some IC companies that are in their expansion cycle choose to expand recruitment. Lisuan Technology (砺算科技), a high-performance GPU developer, has a strong demand for talent. The online application will be open at the beginning of February, for engineers in digital IC design, IC verification, GPU architecture modeling, GPU software development, and embedded development.

In January 2023, the MOHRSS released the top 100 most in-demand occupations in the fourth quarter of 2022 in China. Among them, chipmaking employees ranked 49th, and semiconductor discrete devices and integrated circuits assembly employees ranked 76th, up 38 places and six places respectively than the previous quarter.

By 2024, the IC talent gap in China may be as high as 220,000, of which the design sector will reach around 120,000.

Companies’ lacking talents and graduates’ difficulty in finding jobs coexist. The number of graduates hitting new highs year after year with insufficient work experience and professional skills. Although emerging industries including IC, AI, and new energy are still facing talent shortages, the increasing employment number and the overwhelming hiring costs for employers still pose considerable challenges for graduates.

"We lack both leading talents, and general engineers and technicians. The main reason is that our IC talent training system does not adapt to the development of the industry,” said Wei Shaojun, the vice president of the China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA) and president of ICCAD in his last December speech.

Meanwhile, the geographical allocation of talent needs to be optimized. Currently, China’s IC industry is mainly concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and some provinces and cities in the central and eastern regions. However, the megacities represented by Beijing and Shanghai are home to most of the high-quality universities, and companies in other regions suffer from the lack of talent.

JW Insights' Career Department has been preparing for the spring job fairs for IC companies. “Judging from the resumes collected in 2022 autumn, both the quantity and quality have increased in the past two years, reflecting the high pressure for graduates. Due to the early arrival of the Chinese New Year and adjusted pandemic control policies, the spring recruitment in 2023 is expected to be earlier,” said the JW Insights report.

In addition, companies tend to be more interested in students with scientific research achievements or rich internship experience as they tend to reduce costs to increase benefits amid the downturn in the global semiconductor market.