On March 12, 2024, in Huaibei City, Anhui Province, female college students looked for jobs at the 2024 Women’s Campus Job Fair.
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young people in China Facing an increasingly tough labor market, they are turning to an unlikely place for job search assistance: Tinder.
Liang Jie, a master’s student in Shanghai, decided to clean up his account on dating apps after applying for more than 400 jobs online without success. She’s used it to find romance before, but now finds it useful for casual coffee chats with professionals.
“I just swiped right on individuals in industries I aspired to join,” which was the tech industry, said Liang, 26, who told NBC News she crystallized her aspirations once she started chatting with people she matched with online. intention, and found that the response was usually one of welcome.
Liang is one of China’s job seekers looking for unconventional methods amid fierce competition and scarcity of job opportunities.Some unemployed adults even Be a “stay-at-home kid” Doing housework and running errands for parents in exchange for financial support.
As the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, China is struggling with youth unemployment, which hit a record 21.3% in June last year.back Suspension of youth unemployment data After months of revising calculations, Chinese officials said in December that the unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 24, excluding students, was 14.9%.
Federal Reserve data showed that the unemployment rate for Americans aged 15 to 24 was 8% in the same month.
While high youth unemployment is not unusual for countries like China, Facing other economic challenges“China’s problems seem to be more serious this time,” said Su Yue, chief economist at the Shanghai Economist Intelligence Unit.
“The national economic downturn, the impact of the epidemic, and industrial consolidation are coming at the same time, and they will have a greater impact on the youth group,” she said.
Faced with such pressure, “we can’t help but feel excited when we meet people in the same industry, even when browsing dating apps,” said Joy Geng, a recent graduate of a British university . Currently based in Beijing.
“Saturated” market
Liang first thought of Tinder as a job search tool when she saw a post on Xiaohongshu, China’s equivalent of Instagram, from a user who said she had successfully found a job through a Chinese dating app .
Similar posts suggesting dating apps as a way to find work are not uncommon on Chinese social media.
Last year, a widely circulated meme read: “When the hiring manager asked me how I found out about the opening, it was: Tinder.”
Although Tinder is one of many foreign apps blocked in mainland China, residents can access it through a virtual private network.
“By using dating apps, we can reach more people,” Liang said. “Normally, it takes us a long time to get close to people. But with dating apps, you hang out with strangers for hours and they can already provide you with a wealth of personal information.”
Geng said job seekers may also turn to Tinder because they no longer have access to LinkedIn, which was also blocked in China after it announced it was shutting down. Withdraw from the country 2021 and not satisfied with domestic alternatives.
Liang said that even though she could access LinkedIn through a VPN, she still tried Tinder because she found that traditional job search methods were failing.
“The market is too saturated because of the recession,” she said.
Tinder itself discourages this practice, saying its platform is designed to foster personal relationships, not business ones.
“Tinder is not a place to promote businesses trying to make money,” a company spokesperson told NBC News in a statement.
It also drew criticism from those who were genuinely seeking romantic relationships, who said they could no longer trust other users’ motives.
“I can’t believe people would even use dating apps to find jobs,” one comment on Weibo read. “I can’t believe what a dating app user said in the introduction.”
Romy Liu, who worked for a headhunting firm in Hangzhou, China, said that from an employer’s perspective, finding a job opportunity through Tinder shows that the applicant has “strong social skills” and has impressed someone. Impressed enough that they met just to get a recommendation.
“I think it’s great that people can find jobs through this kind of platform,” she said.
But she said this method is less efficient than traditional job search methods and “may only be feasible if you are applying for a job at a multinational company or an online giant.”
Liu warned that not all employers would be so kind to Tinder’s approach.
“If a state-owned company heard that you were looking for a job on Tinder, I think they would blacklist you permanently,” she said.
Zoey Zeng, who works in the finance industry in Paris, said that while the Tinder method works for job seekers globally, certain factors may make it more effective in China, where the method is mainly used by highly educated professionals.
Tinder users in China “are already very picky because the vast majority of users are studying for degrees overseas,” Zeng said. “But in France, Tinder is famous for finding sex partners – 90 per cent of the people I contacted were looking for friends with benefits.”
“I think the purpose of this software is still different in China and abroad,” said Zeng, who only uses Tinder for socializing.
She said she still found Tinder to be a useful professional tool in Paris because “even though it wasn’t very efficient from my perspective, I was still able to connect with people who perfectly matched my background.”
Liang is still looking for opportunities in China.
“I kind of wanted to give up because it was so hard to find a dream job,” she said. “But I believe I would have been substantially helped if I had actively used dating apps or more of a job search method.”
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