Demand for talent in the artificial intelligence sector continued to gather pace in China's campus recruitment market during the first five months of the year, as companies stepped up hiring for AI-related roles and expanded recruitment beyond the internet sector, according to the latest industry reports.
According to a new report released by the Chinese recruitment platform Maimai, the number of campus job fair recruitment openings grew 3.56 percent year-on-year during the first five months — with growth primarily driven by AI-related hiring, which jumped 47.3 percent year-on-year over the same period.
As a result, AI's share of newly posted graduate positions climbed from 26.41 percent in 2025 to 37.56 percent this year, meaning that nearly four out of every 10 campus vacancies now require AI-related capabilities.
"Compared with previous years, the biggest change in this year's campus recruitment is the further expansion of demand for AI talent," said a recruitment employee at tech giant Alibaba. "More than 80 percent of our campus recruitment openings this year are AI-related, spanning frontier areas including large language models, multimodal AI, AI infrastructure and AI applications."
In terms of specific AI skills, based on a semantic analysis of job descriptions for campus recruitment positions posted during the January-May period, LLM skills emerged as the most sought-after AI capability, followed by AI agents, deep learning, machine learning and multimodal AI, the Maimai report showed.
The changing recruitment landscape is also influencing graduates' career choices. While internet giants remain the preferred employers for many students, interest is spreading rapidly toward hard-tech sectors.
According to the Maimai report, ByteDance, Tencent, Meituan and JD remained among the most searched employers by graduates from leading universities. At the same time, manufacturers specializing in areas such as semiconductors and automobiles have also attracted growing attention.
On the demand side, data from another online recruitment platform Zhaopin.com also point to the rapid growth in demand for AI talent beyond the digital economy and into more application scenarios, with 21 percent of campus recruitment demand for AI engineers coming from the high-end equipment and intelligent manufacturing sectors from January to May.
"The figures show that AI technologies are no longer confined to software development or chip design," a representative from the platform said.
"They are increasingly being integrated into the manufacturing sector, becoming foundational technologies that support the entire industrial value chain. This is also creating broader cross-industry career opportunities for highly skilled graduates."
The rapid spread of AI demand across industries is prompting a rethink of how talent is trained and evaluated.
In the 2026 catalog of undergraduate majors released by the Ministry of Education in April,"interdisciplinary studies" was officially established as a new academic category, bringing together 15 majors in its inaugural intake.
These include 11 existing programs, such as future robotics and interdisciplinary engineering, as well as four newly introduced disciplines, including embodied intelligence and brain-computer science and technology.
The country has also unveiled an "AI+education" action plan, which calls for making AI a foundational course across universities, developing discipline-specific teaching materials and ensuring that all students acquire a basic understanding of AI.
lijiaying@chinadaily.com.cn