Only 30 percent of college graduates in Guangdong Province had signed job contracts by the end of March, down 10 percent compared to the same period last year, according to a conference on the province's graduate employment situation held Monday.

The conference also revealed that more than 650,000 college graduates were hunting for jobs this year in Guangdong Province where campus recruitment plans and available job positions have decreased by 10 percent compared to last year, Nanfang Daily reported Monday.

After this Spring Festival, the Ministry of Education and provincial governments have held meetings on graduate employment of this year and concluded that the financial crisis has caused a downturn in employment opportunities worse than in 2008 when the crisis first hit, Luo Weiqi, head of Guangdong Provincial Education Department said at the conference.

Several factors contributed to the bleak job market including poor economic development, a growing number of college graduates and the gap between graduates' expectations for their jobs and the requirements of the jobs themselves, according to Luo.

"The worse job market has been formed due to various reasons," a teacher surnamed Li with Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, told the Global Times on Tuesday. "The number of college students increases every year, while the job positions have dropped in recent years."

Some companies in Guangzhou even claimed that they are not planning to hire college graduates this year due to increasing labor costs, Li said.

There are 442,000 college graduates in Guangdong Province this year, up 11 percent on 2012, Nanfang Daily reported, with around 7 million graduating nationwide. 

"The overall employment for college graduates is not good compared to previous years," Meng Guang, a senior manager with zhaopin.com, a leading employment website in China, told the Global Times Tuesday.

By March, many graduates had one to three job offers this year while in the same period in previous years, they had four or five offers, according to Meng. 

College students should begin planning for their careers in their third year of college by working as interns, he suggested.

A report released at the conference in Guangdong Province showed that the average starting salary for graduates with bachelor's degree was 2,795 yuan ($449) a month in 2012. In Guangdong, graduates in medical science received 2,394 yuan, the lowest salary in the province, while graduates in the tobacco industry received 4,600 yuan, the highest level. In 2012, about 94 percent graduates with bachelors' degrees found jobs, compared to 90 percent of those with masters' degrees, Nandu Daily reported.

"It's normal that low degree graduates find jobs easily," Meng said. "The service industry has more working opportunities which are fit for lower degree holders because they just require working experience."