Despite private enterprises dominating China's labour market, college-educated workers are still highly concentrated in the state sector. Using data from the Chinese College Student Survey, we find that 64 per cent of students in the sample expressed a strong preference for state sector employment. We also identify several factors associated with receiving job offers from the state sector, including being male, holding urban hukou status, being a member of the CCP, performing well on standardized tests, attending elite universities and having higher household income or high-status parental backgrounds. These findings suggest that despite China's economic transition, the private sector may still struggle to attract highly educated workers.

This study proposes and tests a conceptual model that investigates whether customer orientation acts as a mediator of the relationship between job resourcefulness and hotel employee outcomes. The results from a survey of 145 frontline hotel employees in Iran suggest that customer orientation has a full mediating role in the relationship between job resourcefulness and role-prescribed customer service. Contrary to the hypothesised relationships, there is no empirical support for customer orientation as a mediator of the impact of job resourcefulness on job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.