Wu Xiaoxue visited a street near her factory on a Thursday morning, looking for more workers.

Wu, who runs a small garment factory in a downtown village of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, needed five skilled sewers.

"Only after workers returned to the processing line, could my business resume as soon as possible," she said.

Wu was not alone. In the downtown Guangzhou villages of Datang, Kangle and Ruibao, where a large number of small garment factories are located, dozens of factory owners have been looking for workers after last month's Spring Festival holiday.

"We plan to hire four to five temporary workers. But so far we have not found anyone to work for us," said Liu Tian, who runs a garment factory in Datang near Wu's.

Most garment factories in the city resumed normal operation after the Spring Festival holiday following increased orders, Liu said.

"Young migrant workers are not willing to simply work on a processing line," he said. "The older ones, perhaps, have not yet returned after the holiday."

Liu said his 100-square-meter factory is in urgent need of skilled workers, especially those with years of experience.

"Young people are more willing to work in offices, or in the catering service, cultural creation and innovation industries," he said.

In past years, factories managers picked the workers they wanted as there were many people looking for jobs.

"But things have changed a lot — workers are picking jobs they want, even though we have offered higher salaries," Liu said.

Small garment factories, which have relatively harsh working conditions, have lost their attraction to young workers, said Yang Zhixiong, executive general manager of the Guangzhou International Textile Trade Zone.

"They would like to try more challenging jobs — in the creative design and automated industries," Yang said.

It's not only small businesses in Guangzhou that are facing a shortage of labor. A number of large enterprises in Guangdong's Pearl River Delta region are also looking for more workers.

Galanz Group, a leading household electrical appliance maker based in Zhongshan, has been looking for more than 10,000 new workers to boost its production capacity.

The company is expecting overseas orders to increase by 90 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, said Liang Huiqiang, its vice-chairman.

"The production capacity of refrigerators will increase by more than 80 percent this year and we need more workers," Liang said.

To overcome the labor shortage, human resources authorities in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, Dongguan, Huizhou and Zhongshan have joined hands with their counterparts in the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous regions to organize more than 180 online job events offering over 460,000 jobs.

By early this month, provincial authorities said 2,252 chartered buses, 10 chartered trains and 10 chartered flights had been organized, helping to send more than 86,000 workers to companies in the six cities, which have developed huge demand for migrant workers thanks to the robust development of manufacturing industries.