A college graduate attends an online job interview. (Photo: Xinhua)

BEIJING - Affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, China saw its job positions for employment drop 27 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2020, a report showed.

Recruitment of sectors including purchasing and trading, advertising and exhibition and automobile sales took the most serious hit, with their number of positions falling by more than 50 percent, said a report released by Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.

The epidemic's impact is highly related to the category of industries and the scales and features of enterprises, the report said.

Bucking the trend, occupations such as cooking, technical work, production management and banking were the least affected, according to the report.

The report said that enterprises with smaller sizes and positions with lower incomes are more likely to be affected by the epidemic.

With the implementation of supporting policies, employment is expected to be gradually restored while the consumer demand may return to a normal level step by step as people go back to work, said the report.