Over 10,000 overseas returnees attend job fair

Over 10,000 overseas Chinese returnees participated in the 16th Overseas Returnees Career Fair (Autumn) held at Hall 5 of the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center in Futian District on Saturday. The career fair, specially organized by the Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Returnees Association for overseas Chinese returnees, offered over 5,000 job vacancies.

Overseas Chinese returnees participate in the 16th Overseas Returnees Career Fair (Autumn) on Saturday. Chen Siqi

Companies from various sectors such as finance, biomedicine, internet, services, education, research, security, real estate and media were in attendance. Some prominent companies participating in the fair included Tencent, Hermes, Decathlon, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Foxconn and Standard Chartered.

Tang Anli, secretary-general of the association, summarized that the job fair had a strong turnout with listed and overseas-invested companies like Decathlon, Walmart and EF making up over 50% of participants. About 47% of available positions were in technical and expertise fields. The majority of job seekers (85%) held master’s degrees, and statistics revealed that 33% were recent graduates while 47% graduated within the past three years.

“When overseas students return to China and Shenzhen, the primary challenge they face is finding suitable employment, but they often lack knowledge about how and where to start,” Tang explained the purpose of initiating the job fair. “Therefore, we established this offline job fair exclusively for this group to facilitate connections between graduates and companies,” she added.

Zhou Xueliang, general manager of Decathlon Shekou Outlet, noted the high turnout of the fair. “By Saturday morning, we had already received over 100 resumes,” Zhou told Shenzhen Daily.

Two master’s students majoring in marketing at Hong Kong University found the job fair to be valuable. “Both of us studied in the U.S. and are currently in Hong Kong and plan to pursue our careers in our homeland. However, we lack experience in job hunting on the mainland,” one of the students named Zhao, said. “This job fair offers us opportunities to have face-to-face and in-depth communication with human resources managers, which helps us understand the demand for our kind of educational background in the homeland,” Zhao added.