According to LinkedIn data, there are currently more than 90,000 Chinese businesses operating overseas with overseas recruitment needs. Such enterprises have recruitment demands for as many as 4.5 million overseas positions.

Recruiting someone with a PhD degree is different from someone with a master's or bachelor's degree, as the latter usually master general skills, while PhD students are likely people with specific work experience in a particular field, said Wang.

"For example, if someone completes PhD studies at a lab of a foreign university, that means he or she specializes in research in a very specific field. If a company believes such a field matches the technologies that it currently needs, it will look for candidates from those labs," she said.

Liu said Midea started recruiting Chinese students studying overseas in 2017, but it only accounted for fewer than 10 percent of its total recruitment at that time. It has since grown to over 10 percent, she added.

Wang from LinkedIn said Chinese tech companies are increasingly eyeing highly educated returnees from universities in the fields of science and engineering in countries such as Singapore and the UK.

"Although the overall size of recruitment among companies has decreased due to the macroeconomic environment, the proportion of recruiting overseas returnees has increased. For many companies, their number of positions offered to highly educated returnees increased by 50 to 100 percent last year compared with the previous year," she said.