The China Hi-Tech Fair Exhibition Center was teeming with young people Saturday and Sunday, as tens of thousands of students, graduating next year from all over the country, rushed to Shenzhen to attend a two-day job fair.

The recruitment fair for new graduates, one of the city¡¯s biggest events of its kind, attracted at least 90,000 attendees over the past two days. They were vying for 15,000 vacancies offered by more than 600 Shenzhen companies.

Shenzhen has been one of the most popular destinations for Chinese graduates in recent years. The latest release by the city¡¯s human resources bureau showed that nearly 33,000 graduates landed jobs in Shenzhen in 2005, up 8.8 percent from last year. Eighty percent of them were from colleges and universities outside Shenzhen.

In 2006, the city will need more than 30,000 graduates, mostly in the computer science, information technology, international trade, manufacturing and logistics fields.

¡°The bureau will not limit the number of graduates to be employed in the city, though, but would fully support local companies in drawing talents from all over China,¡± said Lu Tao, deputy head of the human resources bureau in Shenzhen. He added that in the past years, about 50 percent of the attendees had found jobs through this fair.

This is the 14th such fair in the last 12 years.

The job fair saw Shenzhen¡¯s high-tech, port and logistics, and financial industries present, with a number of vacancies offered by such companies as Huawei Technologies, Foxconn, Shenzhen CATIC Group, Ocean Power Corp, and major banks. Huawei and Foxconn offered more than 1,000 openings each, attracting long queues of students in front of their booths.

"Such demands seen at the fair are closely related with the structures and developments of Shenzhen¡¯s industries,¡± said Lu.

Most companies at the fair were satisfied with the kinds of candidates they had met. They said they would read through the piles of resumes collected over the two days and arrange for exams and interviews in the near future.

"We have met some very capable candidates. We think our company can fulfill most of our demands at the fair,¡± said Li Liu from Shenzhen Bond Culture Development Co., a training company offering more than 100 teaching positions.

She said the company would arrange for a written exam and interviews for qualified candidates today, ¡°to quickly land agreements with some students so that they would not go to other companies or cities.¡±

¡°Moreover, as many students are from outside Shenzhen, it is good to finalize the issue soon," said Li.

Some companies, however, complained that the candidates were not as good as the ones they recruited directly from schools.

"We received a lot of applications from students in different majors and schools, but most of them cannot meet our requirements,¡± said Lei Lanjie from Shenzhen Huaqiang Sanyo Tech. Co., which was looking for more than 20 designers.

"As our company need students from specific majors, it¡¯s better for us to go to some specific universities, as we have been doing these years. We might finalize with these candidates Wednesday, but it is not possible to fill up all these vacancies from these candidates,"she added.

Many graduating students interviewed said they were pleased with the companies and positions available at the fair. But most did not expect to land their jobs soon, as it was still too early. The crucial period would be shortly after the Chinese New Year, they said.

The students also said they expected a monthly salary of 2,500 yuan (US$310) for graduates with bachelor¡¯s degrees, and 4,000 yuan for graduates with master's degrees.

Editor: Yan