This year's spring recruitment market is showing an unusually strong momentum. Leading internet companies including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Ant Group, ByteDance, and JD.com have intensively announced large-scale campus recruitment and internship programs, with the number of open positions repeatedly hitting new highs. Among these, AI-related roles have seen a significant increase, with some companies reporting that over 80% of their new positions are AI-focused. Concurrently, job market data from recruitment platforms such as Zhaopin and Maimai confirms the overall market recovery, characterized by a high demand for AI talent.

Leading companies are prioritizing AI talent as their core recruitment focus. Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Ant Group, ByteDance, and JD.com have successively unveiled extensive hiring plans, each emphasizing the acquisition of AI professionals. On March 18, Alibaba officially launched its 2027 intern recruitment program. Sixteen business groups, including Alibaba Cloud, Taotian Group, Tongyi Lab, Wukong Division, and Qianwen Division, simultaneously began hiring. Positions are available in multiple domestic and international cities such as Hangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, and Frankfurt. AI-related roles account for over 80% of the openings, with seven new position types added, including AI Application R&D Engineer and AI Agent Optimization Engineer. The Alibaba Star Program, targeting top young global research talent, also commenced on the same day, covering five major areas: foundational models, AI infrastructure, and large model applications. A representative from Taotian Group indicated that advancements in AI technology are fundamentally changing technical paradigms, suggesting that future engineers will evolve from requirement implementers to "system builders" capable of end-to-end complex problem-solving.

Ant Group initiated its 2026 spring campus recruitment on March 10, with technical roles making up 85% of the openings. This marks the sixth consecutive year that technical positions have exceeded 80% of Ant's spring recruitment. A company representative stated, "We focus on the alignment between the quantity and quality of talent and the company's long-term technological blueprint, rather than short-term business fluctuations." Tencent opened over 10,000 internship positions at once, expanding technical roles by 36% and product roles by 39%. Liu Yifeng, a relevant lead from Tencent Recruitment, mentioned that the company invites more young talent to become co-builders in the AI era, emphasizing that "talent is the cornerstone of building a technological fortress."

According to the "Social Recruitment - 2026 Jan-Feb Mid-to-High-End Talent Recruitment Insight" report released by the Maimai Gaopin Talent Think Tank, the number of new positions in the new economy sector increased by 12.77% year-over-year. The average monthly salary for new positions rose by approximately 9.2%, reaching 48,189 yuan.

AI Talent Recruitment Becomes the Main Battlefield in This Year's Campus Recruitment. AI-related positions have almost dominated various spring recruitment rankings this year. Core AI roles, represented by large model algorithms, top the list of in-demand positions. Data from the Maimai Gaopin Talent Think Tank shows that the average monthly salary for new AI positions is as high as 60,738 yuan, about 26% higher than the new economy sector's average. The highest monthly salary for an AI lead can reach 137,153 yuan. Talent supply-demand ratios for roles such as High-Performance Computing Engineer, SLAM Algorithm Engineer, and Planning & Control Algorithm Engineer are as low as 4 to 7 positions competing for one candidate, highlighting a significant supply gap.

Baidu has intensified its efforts to recruit AI talent, with positions for the 2027 campus recruitment increasing by 35% year-over-year, and AI-related roles accounting for over 90%. While AI talent recruitment previously focused mainly on experienced hires, campus recruitment has now become a primary channel. Data from Zhaopin indicates that positions for AI Engineers targeting fresh graduates grew by 39.2% year-over-year, 17 percentage points higher than the overall growth rate for all positions, with an average monthly salary of 17,038 yuan. According to the Maimai Gaopin Talent Think Tank, over one-third of new job descriptions explicitly mention requirements for AI or large model-related skills, a significant increase compared to the same period in 2025. Nearly 80% of surveyed professionals reported that their companies have set clear requirements for AI capabilities. New positions targeting candidates with less than one year of experience decreased by about 20%, indicating a clear market trend towards de-emphasizing junior roles.

The "OpenClaw" Phenomenon Fuels Demand for Versatile Talent. Understanding the current AI talent boom is inseparable from the most notable tech event since the start of the year: the explosive popularity of OpenClaw ("Lobster"). This open-source AI agent, launched in January 2026, can execute terminal commands, read and write files, and send and receive emails on behalf of users, earning the nickname "digital employee that can command computers." Within 48 hours of its release on GitHub, OpenClaw's stargazer count surged from 9,000 to 106,000, setting a new record for open-source project growth speed. To date, the total number of stars has exceeded 270,000, surpassing Linux to become the top-ranked open-source software globally. As users need to perform data feeding, environment configuration, and instruction training to personalize the agent—a process highly reminiscent of "farming"—a nationwide trend of "raising Lobsters" has emerged.

Domestic tech giants quickly followed suit. Tencent organized free installation events at its Shenzhen headquarters, attracting nearly a thousand developers and AI enthusiasts queuing up. Tencent successively released products like WorkBuddy and QClaw. Baidu Intelligent Cloud launched the zero-deployment service DuClaw. Alibaba Cloud introduced the CoPaw personal agent workspace. Ant Group's Alipay Tbox announced support for free OpenClaw experiences. JD.com's internal JoyAgent team has already deployed over 50,000 production-level agents.

This trend has directly increased demand for AI Agent talent. Ant Group stated that AI Agents are a crucial form for large model implementation, noting, "We now not only need people who 'build tools' but also versatile talent who can understand complex workflows and use AI tools to reshape business logic. Talent demand is shifting towards 'AI-native thinking'." Baidu specifically established positions like Agent Strategy Engineer and Agent R&D Engineer, and launched the "PSIG Starsea Plan" with the goal of recruiting talent to "build leading personal super agents." Taotian Group also listed AI Agent Optimization Engineer as one of this year's three most representative positions.

In Baidu's 2027 summer internship recruitment, positions based in Beijing account for over 80% of the total, with more than 4,000 offers expected to be issued. A visit to Baidu's campus recruitment website reveals that Beijing positions are represented by roles such as Large Model Algorithm Engineer, Cross-Modal Generation Algorithm Engineer, Large Model Evaluation Product Manager, and Agent R&D Engineer, covering four major categories: technology, product, government-enterprise industry solutions & services, and professional services & management support. Machine learning, large model training, multimodal AI, and autonomous driving are the most concentrated technical directions. Taotian Group indicated that its Beijing recruitment focuses primarily on technical roles, with key hiring departments being Business Technology, Alimama, and the Intelligent Algorithm Division. For JD.com, Beijing serves as the core technology and management center, with all seven business segments and functional teams having a presence there. Procurement & sales and technology R&D positions are the recruitment priorities, overall covering technology, product, logistics, operations, marketing, and business directions.

During the spring recruitment, internship positions with the possibility of conversion to full-time roles have become highly sought after by students. A computer science undergraduate from a Beijing-based 211 university shared that her primary consideration when applying for internships this year is the potential for conversion. "The competition in the autumn recruitment is too fierce now. If you perform well during the internship and can receive a direct offer, it's like using your fresh graduate status more effectively, and it provides much more psychological security." She mentioned that many peers are adopting the strategy of first securing an internship at a major company and then striving for conversion. "This year, everyone seems to be treating internships as the autumn recruitment, starting the fight early."

Major companies have further strengthened their conversion pathways this year, with increasing conversion rates. Among Baidu's formally hired campus recruits over the years, over 50% converted from internships. This year, Baidu opened more than 5,000 summer internship offers for the 2027 class, with conversion evaluations expected to start in mid-July, allowing outstanding performers to lock in campus recruitment offers early. ByteDance announced its largest-ever conversion internship recruitment drive, planning to hire 7,000 interns with a conversion rate exceeding 50%. Daily salaries for R&D and product roles can be as high as 500 yuan. JD.com stated that it offered 10,000 convertible internship positions in 2026, with rolling recruitment throughout the year. Interns can apply for the conversion defense after completing 65 working days, with the possibility of receiving a formal offer as early as May. JD.com also tailored a "Five-Year Growth Plan" for campus hires, with no set年限 for promotion and cross-level promotions open to all campus recruits.

Young Talent Taking on Major Roles; Post-00s Generation Leading the Way in Major Firms. From tackling technical challenges to driving business innovation, and from algorithmic breakthroughs to team management, a cohort of young campus hires is rapidly growing into key roles. A former campus recruit who joined Ant Group has become the Technical Director of the Fundamental Intelligence Department, leading the development of several intelligent systems, including the百灵large language model Ling. He has published over a hundred papers in top-tier CCF A/B conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and VLDB, been granted more than 40 invention patents, and received the Wu Wenjun AI Science and Technology Progress Award First Prize from the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. A participant in Baidu's AIDU program made core algorithmic contributions to an urgent project within a year of joining in 2022, later led the iteration of four model versions for a digital human project, and now manages a team of dozens. Another management trainee proactively established the company's first Strategy Product Manager role in 2024 and now leads a small, integrated "product-operation-research" team in continuous exploration. From independently solving technical难题 to leading entire business lines, the experiences of these young individuals illustrate that major companies are increasingly handing over substantial responsibilities to younger generations.