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First for fun, now for recruitment: live streams help jobseekers in China find new employers

  • Live-streaming recruitment, in which agents introduce job openings to viewers and send links for them to apply, has gained popularity
  • Big Tech firms including Kuaishou Technology and rival ByteDance have introduced services dedicated to the new form of recruitment

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Liu Chao, a former e-commerce live-streamer, runs a live-streaming recruitment channel. Photo: Screenshot
Tracy Qu
China’s live-streaming platforms have emerged as a new channel for employers to meet prospective employees, as job candidates go online to search for opportunities amid Covid-19 travel restrictions and what economists call the country’s most challenging job market ever.

Liu Chao, 33, finds “selling” jobs surprisingly easier than his previous job as an e-commerce live-streamer. “After selling [clothes] through live-streaming for several months, I realised we didn’t have many advantages, so I gave up,” Liu said. “By coincidence, I met another friend working in the human resources industry and came up with the idea of hiring through short videos and live-streaming.”

Now Liu regularly live-streams himself to introduce job vacancies to his viewers. After offering details of a position, he puts up a link where jobseekers can submit their information to apply. “For example, if I’m promoting [electronics and car manufacturing] company BYD, I will put up the company’s job application link and guide viewers to sign up while I talk.”

Kuaishou Technology introduced a dedicated recruitment channel, Kwai Recruitment, in January, aiming to help connect blue-collar workers and factories. Photo: Screenshot
Kuaishou Technology introduced a dedicated recruitment channel, Kwai Recruitment, in January, aiming to help connect blue-collar workers and factories. Photo: Screenshot

As live-streaming recruitment becomes increasingly popular, Liu has accumulated a team of around 30 people over the past two years, providing services that cover the entire hiring process, from connecting with enterprise resources and live-streaming to attract job seekers to following up with candidates after they submitted an application and helping them better adapt to their new jobs.

“It’s a long chain, which is different from live-streaming e-commerce,” Liu said. “If you are selling products, consumers can easily get refunds if the product doesn’t match their expectations … But in recruitment, jobseekers need to find a path and settle down [with a new job].”

Big Tech firms including Kuaishou Technology and rival ByteDance, owner of TikTok and its Chinese sibling Douyin, have made moves into the emerging field. Kuaishou, where Liu conducts his live streams, introduced a dedicated recruitment channel in January, aiming to help connect blue-collar workers and factories.

The service, called Kwai Recruitment, drew more than 100 million monthly active users in the first quarter, Kuaishou revealed during a post-earnings conference call in May. On one day during the Spring Festival in February, the channel received 150,000 resumes.

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