Fake jobseekers recruited through WeChat to make work fair at Grand Hyatt hotel in Hong Kong look more popular
- Event organised by a mainland city offers roles paying up to US$435,000 a year
- Actors handed US$25 to attend and feign interest in jobs, Post investigation finds
Inside a grand ballroom of a five-star hotel in Hong Kong in early May, hundreds of people crammed the booths of a mainland government job fair that offered annual salaries as high as 3 million yuan (US$432,000) for some professional positions across the border.
But among the job hunters, dozens were actors, who were paid HK$200 to pretend to be applicants at the three-hour fair at the Grant Hyatt hotel in Wan Chai, according to a Post investigation.
Organised by the government of Ningbo, a major port and industrial hub to the south of Shanghai, the job fair had attracted 51 recruiters, including universities, research institutes, state-owned enterprises, private companies and NGOs.
A total of 820 positions were available, offering an average annual wage of 300,000 to 500,000 yuan, and as much as 3 million yuan for a post at a bio company , according to a post-event statement by the Ningbo Human Resources Service Centre.
The centre, a public institution under Ningbo’s human resources authorities, arranged the fair with support from Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong and the Ningxing Group, which is the Ningbo government’s investment vehicle in the city.