Sinopec Group, China's largest oil refiner, confirmed to the Global Times Sunday that the group's subsidiaries canceled some of their pre-signed employment agreements in January, given that their yearly quotas for recruitment have been reduced or eliminated due to their gloomy outlook.

The terminated agreements involved some 800 students who are due to graduate in July 2013. They signed employment agreements with some of Sinopec's subsidiaries at the end of 2012 or earlier, Lü Dapeng, the group's spokesperson, told the Global Times Sunday. He added that the concerned students have received compensation according to the terms of the pre-signed agreements.

"Our subsidiaries used to get quotas from Sinopec human resources every year without much change in the amount. They got used to recruiting independently and signing agreements with graduates before the quota distribution. But in 2013, the group shifted independent recruitment to fairer centralized recruitment and reduced the quotas for some inefficient branches," Lü said.

Some oil fields such as the Sinopec Zhongyuan Oilfield, headquartered in Puyang, Central China's Henan Province, suffer shrinking resources and have no need to hire new staff, said Lü.

Sinopec's decision comes at a late date when domestic campus recruitment for students with oil-related majors is almost over, causing heartache to many who had already declined other offers, according to a report in The Economic Observer Saturday.

The prime time for campus recruitment is between September and November, Xie Zheng, a human resources consultant from recruitment advisory firm Pro-Matrix & Co, told the Global Times.

There is a serious shortage of talent in the domestic oil industry, but graduates with no working experience have a hard time finding jobs if they miss the prime season, she said, adding that Sinopec, which has the most employees of its domestic peers, made a wise move in downsizing its employment scale to enhance efficiency.

The reduction in domestic human resources costs aims to offset the group's huge losses in refinery operation in recent years, Gao Jian, an industry analyst from commodity information website sci99.com, told the Global Times.

Sinopec is having a hard time providing new positions amid a sluggish global economy, Lü said. "The number of employees was 1.05 million in 2012, compared to 1.06 million in 2011." But he noted that the group created 2,000 new positions for 2013 in non-oil sectors like the coal chemical industry.

According to its latest financial results, Sinopec's refinery business reported a loss of 16.4 billion yuan ($2.6 billion) for the nine months through September 2012, and a loss of $37.6 billion in 2011.

Sinopec's rivals including China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) all face similar losses and are likely to shift expansion from domestic markets to overseas in 2013, in hopes of acquiring advanced technologies from foreign counterparts to further the exploitation of domestic oil fields, said Gao.