Some 25,800 people attended Saturday's job fair for white-collar workers, vying for about 20,000 job vacancies offered by 320 enterprises, yesterday's Shenzhen Special Zone Daily reported.

Nearly 15 percent of the employers at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center were among the world's top 500 companies, including Sony, Hitachi and Emerson. The rest included famous domestic companies including Lenovo, Huawei and ZTE, the Daily report said. The participating companies represented sectors ranging from electronics and telecoms to logistics and bio-engineering.

The average annual salary on offer was 50,000 yuan (US$6,579). "Since the start of this year, our employees have seen a 10 percent increase in their salary," said a woman surnamed Zhang with the human resources department of a Shenzhen-based software company.

Software and mechanical engineers were still the most sought-after employees, the Daily report said. Some companies still failed to find the right people among the attendees even after offering an annual salary of more than 100,000 yuan.

(Shenzhen Daily August 27, 2007)