Bosses try to woo workers as economy recovers (2)

Official data also showed that the purchasing managers' index (PMI) for China's manufacturing sector has been kept above 50 percent for four straight months since October. The January figure fell slightly by 0.2 percentage point from December to 50.4 percent.

A PMI reading above 50 percent indicates expansion, while a reading below 50 percent indicates contraction.

Manufacturing is regaining momentum, boosted by domestic and global recoveries, said Zhang Weiguo, an economic expert with the Shandong Academy of Social Sciences. He forecast that manufacturers will do much better than last year.

"This year the company has plenty of orders. Workers can soon start work once they are in place," Wang Jiwan said, adding that Hengda, which ships 40 percent of products overseas, will see sales up about 30 percent in 2013 as international demand rebounds.

Meanwhile, Shandong Haosheng Group, a home textile manufacturer, is short of about 500 workers due to increasing orders from the domestic market.

The company has seized orders from seven upstream firms in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces after the Spring Festival, according to the company's human resource manager, Sun Luguang.

Most employers will scale up hiring in the first quarter this year, especially the post-Spring Festival period, as the economy rebounded in last quarter, said Feng Lijuan, a human resource expert with 51job.com, China's leading online job-hunting service provider.

Labor-intensive industries including real estate, automobile parts manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies posted a high number of recruitment requests, according to a survey conducted by 51job.com.

Meanwhile, experts said China's economy will pick up steam this year. A report compiled by Xiamen University forecast that the country's economic growth will rise by 0.43 percentage points from last year to reach 8.23 percent in 2013.