Report on the Work of the Government 2025 emphasized the need to “strengthen the coordination and support of various funds and resources to promote full employment and improve employment quality”. Against this backdrop, there is an urgent need to reshape the job creation path through industry-finance cooperation via institutional reforms, thereby breaking the cycle of “difficult financing-weak investment-poor employment”. The industry-finance cooperation pilot program provides crucial support for boosting employment by guiding financial resources to precisely serve the real economy. Under the policy direction of “stabilizing and expanding employment with greater efforts”, this paper takes the policy of national pilot cities for industry-finance cooperation as a quasi-natural experiment to systematically analyze and empirically test the “employment stabilization” effect of industry-finance cooperation. The results show that the pilot program significantly increases corporate labor-hiring levels, contributing to the achievement of the “employment stabilization” goal. Mechanism testing reveals that the pilot program primarily achieves its employment stabilization effect through external financing acquisition and enterprise scale expansion effects. On the one hand, it alleviates information asymmetry between banks and enterprises, facilitating access to more external financing, easing corporate liquidity constraints, and consequently affecting their labor-hiring decisions. On the other hand, it helps reduce financing costs and improve operational efficiency, enabling rapid and stable business development; as enterprises expand their operations, they simultaneously drive employment growth. Heterogeneity analysis finds that the employment stabilization effect is more pronounced in enterprises with weaker debt-paying capacity, higher growth potential, lower innovation levels, and poorer ESG performance, as well as in enterprises located in the central and western regions. Further research based on labor skill structure indicates that the pilot program significantly increases the number of employees from lower-educated labor groups, while the employment promotion effect on higher-educated labor groups is not significant. This paper not only provides a theoretical basis for exploring new paths to stabilize employment from the perspective of industry-finance cooperation, but also offers empirical references for further refining the industry-finance cooperation pilot policy.