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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Han Ji-min, Lee Joon-hyuk
Latest Nielsen rating: 6.5 per cent
Kang Ji-yoon, the protagonist played by Han Ji-min (Behind Your Touch) in the new drama Love Scout, is one of the best headhunters in Korea.
Whether reading their stats on a résumé or sizing them up in person, she can quickly get a read on someone to know if they are the right fit for a particular job and figure out how to convince them that they are.


As perceptive as Ji-yoon is, when it comes to her immediate surroundings, she suddenly becomes myopic. She forgets her colleagues’ names, never remembers which way the door to her office opens, and keeps misplacing her shoes.
It also takes her a long time to recognise the abundant talents of her new secretary, Yoo Eun-ho (Lee Joon-hyuk, Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard).
As her long-suffering chief financial officer Seo Mi-ae (Lee Sang-hee) points out, Ji-yoon cannot even remember how many people have run away screaming from the post over the past year – that is how demanding it is.
However, Eun-ho is not your normal secretary. No matter how thoughtless Ji-yoon is and how much work is thrown at him, he never misses a beat, never makes a mistake, and never loses his cool.

To be fair to Ji-yoon, she has cause to be wary of Eun-ho, who she first meets when she fails to land a major candidate for one of her clients at the beginning of the series.
The person she is trying to scout is Yang Ho-jin (Kwon Hyuk), a veteran engineer at Hansu Electronics. He is wary of leaving the company he has worked with for so long and Ji-yoon finally fails to snag him thanks to the tireless efforts of a dogged member of the human resources team at Hansu – Eun-ho.
What Ji-yoon does not know is that Eun-ho is a black sheep at Hansu. A single father, Eun-ho took a leave of absence when his sick daughter needed him during a sensitive time for his department, and his manager has never forgiven him for it.
When Ji-yoon’s sneaky headhunting rival Kim Hye-jin (Park Bo-kyung) manages to pry Ho-jin away for a different client, Eun-ho is blamed and kicked to the kerb after he is framed for leaking company secrets.

With a daughter to take care of, Eun-ho is loath to turn down a job offer when his friend Mi-ae realises that he would make the perfect secretary for her demanding boss Ji-yoon.
Eun-ho arrives at the office of Ji-yoon’s headhunting firm Peoplez, greeted by friendly and sympathetic new colleagues all expecting him to fail. Ji-yoon, who is not happy to see him, is too busy to really pay him any attention.
Ji-yoon’s headaches are caused by the demanding nature of her work and also her mounting rivalry with Hye-jin, the chief executive of Career Way, the top headhunting firm.
Hye-jin is driven, but there is a personal angle to that drive as well, as Ji-yoon used to work at Career Way until she left following the death of the former boss of the company, for which she was blamed.

Beyond professional trauma, Ji-yoon also has the personal kind, which comes bubbling up in early spring every year, when cherry blossoms remind her of her late father, who perished in a fire when Ji-yoon was a young girl.
All of this stress has begun to manifest itself physically. A doctor points to a medical, stress-related reason for her forgetfulness and clumsiness. Whether she likes it or not, she needs to rely on someone, and that someone is Eun-ho.
Eun-ho learns all of Ji-yoon’s quirks, from the temperature she likes her coffee to the way she likes her documents stapled, and he also becomes her invisible helping hand, shielding her head from cabinet drawers and rubber-padding the sharp edges of the office furniture she keeps bumping into.
Given its familiar protagonists, a workaholic career woman with a traumatic backstory and a picture-perfect male lead, Love Scout does not score many points for originality.

However, thanks to the charisma of its leads and the undeniable spark between them, this office romcom has more than enough charm and charisma to breeze along in its early episodes.
That said, the ultimate success of Love Scout will be determined by how well it transitions from the frothy office fun of its opening to the emotional and dramatic weight that’s surely at its core.
Love Scout is streaming on Netflix.


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One of South Korea’s best headhunters hires an unflappable secretary in this romcom. It is frothy and fun, but will there be any substance?


In Netflix K-drama Love Scout, Han Ji-min, Lee Joon-hyuk butt heads in headhunting romcom

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}One of South Korea’s best headhunters hires an unflappable secretary in this romcom. It is frothy and fun, but will there be any substance?

One of South Korea’s best headhunters hires an unflappable secretary in this romcom. It is frothy and fun, but will there be any substance?