Chinese B2C e-commerce website 360buy.com has announced via its official microblog that it plans to recruit 20,000 new e-commerce talents in 2012 to meet the development demands of the company.

The newly recruited employees will reportedly include 5,000 university graduates, 1,000 software engineers, and 1,000 employees with industry experience. At present, 360buy.com has over 13,000 employees, working at various departments like procurement, development, logistics, sales, and marketing.

Liu Qiangdong, chairman and chief executive officer of 360buy.com, said that training a core e-commerce team at the beginning of the business is the major competitiveness of the company.

The scale of the Chinese e-commerce market is expected to maintain an annual growth rate of about 40% from 2010 to 2013, and the demands for e-commerce talents continue to increase. Statistics show that by the end of June 2011, China had 23,200 e-commerce websites, an increase of 21.38% compared with that of January 2011. In the next ten years, the Chinese e-commerce talent gap will reach three million.