Foreign Beijing-based firms are having a harder time recruiting expatriates because of the deteriorating quality of the air in the city, according to NPR.

Angie Eagan, managing director of human resource consulting company MRI China, said that 20 to 30 percent of their China-based clients acknowledge that work locations in any of China's polluted cities now qualify as hardship posts.

Like Us on Facebook

"They are having a horrible time getting people to go into Beijing," she said.

She added that firms often offer incentives such as fixed-term contracts, hardship allowances, and in some cases, even offered two residences.

However, it seems that recruitment of manpower is not the only thing that foreign Beijing-based firms have to worry about. In recent years, hundreds of expat executives are estimated to have left China because of the air, said ECA International regional director Lee Quane.

Micah Truman, a partner at AsiaWise based in Beijing, has been working as an expat since 1994 where he met his wife and eventually started a family.

Nevertheless, after two decades in Beijing, he has decided to leave and relocate to Seattle.

"The environment obviously has degraded, the business is cutthroat, traffic is at an absolute standstill. Everything has just gotten emotionally, financially, environmentally so extreme and at a certain point, you have to say, 'no more'," he said.

He mentioned that most of his long-time expat co-workers are also planning to leave within the next two years mainly because of the air pollution.

"I'm in my early 40s, I have kids, they are 10 and 11, and I think many of us are saying, we want a life for our kids in a physically, healthy environment," he added.

James McGregor, chairman of Greater China for consulting firm APCO Worldwide, shares Truman's sentiment.

McGregor, who has worked in Beijing for 25 years, points out that the re-emergence of the 'hardship post' is a throwback to the 1980s and 1990s when China-based firms offered incentives to attract recruits because Beijing was not yet fully developed at the time.

Decades later, Beijing is now one of the more developed cities in the world but McGregor has decided to leave as well alluding to the city's air pollution as a major factor.

As of Wednesday, Beijing's real-time air quality index is 182 - an unhealthy air pollution level where members of the population may already "begin to experience health effects," according to AQICN.org.

TagsAQICN, real-time air quality index, Expatriates in China, expats, Environment