Alibaba Group has launched its largest-ever university graduate recruitment drive across mainland China, capitalizing on Generation Z students’ aspirations of a career in e-commerce.
The Hangzhou-headquartered e-commerce giant said it is advertising 113 different entry-level roles, 45 of which are open to fresh graduates for the first time.
The move comes as Alibaba looks to nurture and motivate junior staff among its ranks and as leadership highlights the continuing need for innovation in a competitive landscape.
“Young talent is often on the frontlines of our various businesses and has become the backbone of the company,” Alibaba’s Chief People Officer Judy Tong said in a statement earlier this week.
Alibaba was the preferred choice of employer among students of business and commerce at mainland Chinese universities for the second year running, according to a recent survey.
The firm also ranked within the top two slots among the Generation Z (Gen Z) students majoring in engineering, natural sciences and the humanities, said Stockholm-based employer branding specialist Universum.
Universum polled 58,644 students at 108 mainland Chinese universities about their views on which companies they thought would make the most attractive employers of 2021.
Gen Z, the cohort defined by demographers as those born between 1995 and 2010, is the first social generation to have grown up with mobile internet access. Globally, these digital natives are on track to be the most educated generation yet.
Young talent is often on the frontlines of our various businesses and has become the backbone of the company
Zoomers, as they are known, are entering the job market at an uncertain time economically as many countries are still grappling with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. China’s affluent younger generation has never experienced a downturn prior to the pandemic battering the nation’s economy early last year.
Universum’s survey also showed e-commerce headlining the rankings of university students’ most preferred industry to kickstart their careers, at 28% of those polled. E-commerce has boomed over the past year as shoppers turned to digital channels during lockdowns.
Non-technical positions will account for more than half of all of the newly created positions at Alibaba, such as advertising, marketing, commercial interior design, content planning, cross-border supply chain management and customer-service robot trainers.
For science and technology graduates, a number of positions in cutting-edge fields are also open to fresh graduates for the first time, including technical standardization engineers, analog-design engineers, video-codec engineers and quantum-computing scientists.
Alibaba’s campus recruiters are spanning out to attend job fairs in Chinese cities such as Hangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Wuxi, as well as Ulan Qab.
Alibaba officially launched the 2022 campus recruitment program on July 19 targeting students graduating in the academic year ending next year.
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