South China's Guangzhou City, a major destination for migrant farmer workers, plans to extend online job interviews to farmers to a further 55 administrative districts nationwide this year.

The plan was unveiled days after the Guangdong provincial legislature adopted a proposal that a channel targeting migrant workers should be opened at a local TV station to tell them about job vacancies and for job training.

Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, had already launched the "remote job interview" system in 2003 with 45 administrative districts including Bose in Guangxi and Chengdu in Sichuan. It plans to extend the system to a further 55 other districts this year, said Zhao Baoying, director of Guangzhou Human Resources Market Service Center, on Wednesday.

Guangzhou companies put recruitment information into the system's database for migrant workers to remotely search. Internet job interviews can also be held, according to Zhao.

The system can save the job-seeking migrant workers from much travel, the official added.

As the global financial crisis took a toll on the economy, about 20 million migrant workers in the country returned to the countryside from cities without jobs, according to Chen Xiwen, director of the office of the central leading group on rural work, early this month.

An estimated 600,000 migrant workers have left China's major manufacturing center Guangdong Province because of unemployment last year in 2008 after the worldwide financial crisis hit the region.

Guangdong provincial human resources and social security department predicted that in the first quarter of this year, the province was expecting an influx of 2.6 million migrant workers from outside Guangdong who don't have clear job offers.

Guangzhou's online job interview system was welcomed in many areas, especially those having an abundant supply of laborers.

Zheng Qiang, a labor official in the southwestern Sichuan Province, said the system would greatly reduced costs when migrant farmers were looking for jobs.

Zheng said that about 12 million laborers left Sichuan for jobs in other provinces every year and more than 5 million work in China's industrial powerhouse of the Pearl River Delta region.

(Xinhua News Agency February 26, 2009)