Author | Shuangmu@AMZ123 Statement | The copyright of this article belongs to AMZ123, and it cannot be reproduced without permission.

How much sorrow can cross-border people have? The long road of job-seeking seems endless.

AMZ123 has observed that during the golden period of March and April, topics related to job-seeking and recruitment have once again become the focus of attention in the cross-border circle.

However, unlike previous years when employment "spring breeze" was welcomed, according to recent feedback from the industry, in 2026, this golden job-seeking season seems to be losing its past "recruitment peak halo", evolving into a "bronze March and iron April" characterized by supply-demand mismatch and value revaluation.

AMZ123 understands that during this year's "golden March and silver April", there are not a few cross-border job seekers who are in a confused period of job-seeking.

Located in Bantian, Shenzhen, an operator posted on social media that with more than two years of operational experience, after interviewing with multiple companies, he found that compared to previous years, the salary trend for operational positions with the same experience has dropped significantly this year, and basically cannot meet expectations.

Less than 24 hours after the post was published, it received responses from many peers:

"I can empathize. With more than four years of experience, I offered 10k, but the company said they could only give 9k."

"With more than five years of experience, there are very few interview opportunities. I reported 9k on the transfer platform before someone from HR greeted me. It was reported too low."

At the same time, some operators said that this year not only has the salary been reduced, but also the number of interview opportunities and pass rates are lower than in previous years: last year there could be eight interviews in a week when looking for a job, with a high pass rate, but this year there are very few interview opportunities, and most of the interviews participated in did not pass.

Looking at the data from comprehensive institutions and the recruitment market, there are two main reasons for this situation:

One is the imbalance between supply and demand in the cross-border talent market. Taking cross-border operation as an example, according to Zhiyongji data, as of April 2026, the number of recruitment positions for cross-border operation positions has decreased by 18% compared with the same period in 2025. While the supply of positions has contracted, the supply of job seekers has skyrocketed against the trend - a large number of talents from Internet layoffs have overflowed, and highly educated graduates have poured into the cross-border track, causing traditional experience to depreciate significantly.

The second is that with the development of the industry, the recruitment demands of enterprises have changed, and the core contradiction with the job-seeking side is erupting - mainly concentrated on the double mismatch of "ability matching degree" and "talent cost-effectiveness".

While job seekers express "job-seeking difficulties", many cross-border companies are also deeply mired in the quagmire of "difficulty in recruitment". Some HRs said that although some operators have rich experience, their ability system mostly relies on old models and lacks high-level abilities such as data decision-making, category deep cultivation, and risk control, which are out of touch with enterprise needs. Therefore, although they can receive a large number of resumes every day, few meet the requirements.

Some sellers also mentioned that job seekers' expectations for salary still remain at the dividend period of the industry's barbaric growth, but many cross-border companies have continued to tighten their recruitment budgets after ending the past "human sea tactics" expansion model, and are no longer willing to pay high trial and error costs for job seekers who have not yet made achievements, have single skills, and have more repetitive labor operations.

In addition, the popularization of AI tools is also intensifying this contradiction. According to Shopify data, before 2020, the penetration rate of AI in cross-border e-commerce was less than 10%, which rose to 72% in 2024 and reached 78% at the beginning of 2026.

For example, the recently popular "colleague.skill" on the technical community GitHub, the skill points of this skill are "provide your colleague's material plus your subjective description to generate an AI skill that can really work for him", and claim to "turn cold farewells into warm skills and join the cyber immortal".

As of the evening of April 4th, this project has accumulated nearly 70,000 stars on GitHub, which indirectly confirms the real impact of the AI development wave on the workplace.

With the increase of "digital employees", the demand for basic positions has dropped sharply, and the value of human resources has shifted from "executive labor" to "decision-making thinking", which is also one of the core inducements for the supply-demand mismatch in the recruitment market.

AMZ123 learned that in 2026, AI's tentacles have deeply penetrated into multiple scenarios in the field of cross-border e-commerce, from Listing generation, customer service response, to product selection analysis, inventory prediction, advertising optimization... Not only a large number of basic and repetitive operations have been replaced, but some skills that were once regarded as the core competitiveness of operations are also being greatly reduced in dimension.

Take Listing optimization as an example. In the past, operators needed to have certain foreign language abilities and repeatedly write and test copywriting. Now AI can not only automatically generate SEO-optimized product descriptions, advertising copywriting and social media posts, but also cover multiple languages, saving trial and error time.

For example, data analysis that requires higher requirements, in the past, operators needed to spend a lot of time and energy staring at the backend, repeatedly adjusting placement strategies, investigating and analyzing competitive intelligence, now AI can capture and monitor data changes in real-time, and the efficiency is far beyond manual work. Some sellers said after actual testing that this operation either relied on experience or hard calculation by Excel formula in the past, but now it can be quickly completed with the help of AI.

However, it should be emphasized that AI is not eliminating positions, but reconstructing positions. The "2026 Greater China Executive Confidence Insight Report" released by Michael Page clearly pointed out: AI is moving from topics to the depths of functions, but more positions will be "positioned upgraded" with industrial upgrading, rather than simply being replaced. This is also confirmed in the talent needs of cross-border enterprises.

Under the premise that AI replaces a large number of basic executive works, the recruitment logic of cross-border enterprises has shifted from "recruiting human resources to fill gaps" to "recruiting talents to control the overall situation", focusing on two core standards: ultimate cost-effectiveness and deep thinking ability.

The first is "ultimate cost-effectiveness". Against the background of cost reduction and efficiency increase in the industry, enterprises have reached the ultimate control of labor costs, and recruitment core demands have shifted from "professional and dedicated" to "all-round and composite", that is, they tend to recruit all-round talents to contract multiple positions.

For example, currently, when enterprises recruit operations, they require them to be proficient in Listing optimization, advertising placement, data analysis and almost the whole process. Their core value is that they can replace the work of multiple basic positions in the past by themselves, and at the same time cooperate with AI tools to double the efficiency. For enterprises, such talents have "cost-effectiveness" - it is cheaper than hiring multiple basic positions alone, and more flexible than relying solely on AI.

Secondly, it is "deep thinking ability". The advantage of AI lies in strong execution, but lack of understanding and decision-making ability, which is precisely the core value of human resources that cannot be replaced: understanding business logic, users, and products.

As Rupert Foster, Senior Managing Director of Michael Page Greater China, said: The use of AI has the risk of "efficiency improvement but efficiency decline" - if practitioners completely hand over the reflection process to AI tools, their in-depth understanding of customer needs may be weakened. In other words, AI can help companies do things faster, but it cannot guarantee that what it does is definitely the right thing.

Specific to cross-border e-commerce operation positions, AI can generate product selection suggestions based on data, but it doesn't know the cultural taboos of a certain category in a specific market; AI can automatically generate marketing copywriting, but it can't really understand the emotional nodes that consumers are touched... These "humanized" abilities are not obtained by "skillful operation", but from the operator's in-depth understanding of the business and continuous thinking about market logic.

Nowadays, most cross-border enterprises no longer need "people who can only operate". What they need are "thinking people" - people who can use AI to control efficiency, make decisions with in-depth insights, and create profits with overall thinking. It is not difficult to predict that such talents will not lack job opportunities in the future whether it is "golden March and silver April" or "bronze March and iron April".

What do you think about this? Welcome to communicate and discuss in the comments~

Article Source: AMZ123 Cross-border E-commerce (WeChat Official Account)
Author: Shuangmu@AMZ123
Original Link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/qzQGnw6Z1cFKVZ72IjjwwQ