In early 2022, Yang Mingqi, a student majoring in food safety at a vocational college in Shandong Province, faced a challenging job market – 70 percent of her graduating class could not find a job. With offline interviews hampered by Covid-induced travel restrictions, she turned to livestreaming apps.
While watching a Kuaishou livestream, she discovered a job opportunity at Goertek, an acoustic components company headquartered in Weifang, Shandong Province, that promised a competitive salary and satisfactory working conditions. She clicked the link and sent in her resume. Soon after, the company called her. After negotiating her salary and other job details, she interviewed and landed the job. She later referred several classmates to the company.
Similarly with the aid of Kuaishou, Che Jianping and his wife from Gansu Province, both in their 40s, found employment at an electronics factory in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province. The couple, who previously ran a noodle restaurant, transitioned to factory work with the help of Liu Chao, an employment agent livestreaming on Kuaishou, according to a Caijing report.
Though initially wary of employment agents, Che said he developed a trust for Liu after watching his livestream daily. For many migrant workers like Che who had never left their home provinces, this trust was crucial to them making the leap to a factory job in a faraway city.
Livestreaming platforms have significantly reduced the time and effort that job hunts normally take, reducing the process from several months to days.
According to Zhang Chenggang, director of the new employment research center at CUEB, compared to traditional hiring models, livestreaming makes the hiring process more transparent. By providing more in-depth information about posts and job markets, the likelihood of successful job matches is higher, Zhang said.
In late 2021, Kuaishou launched its new employment platform Kuaipin (also known as Kwai Hire). Targeting the blue-collar job market, which generally sees the highest turnover rates, the platform provides more extensive and accurate portrayals of the offered positions, something that many job seekers say traditional hiring channels fail to provide.
The platform quickly attracted employers, including major manufacturers in Apple’s supply chain, like component manufacturers Luxshare-ICT and Goertek, and automaker BYD.
Livestream recruiting is especially cost-effective for factories, which experience extremely high turnover rates and need new hires every few days. For example, Luxshare-ICT has 200,000 positions but hires 500,000 workers every year.
In 2022, Kuaipin hosted more than five million livestreams, saw 250 million monthly active users and partnered with 240,000 companies. On January 28, Kuaipin processed over 500,000 resumes.
Douyin, China’s TikTok, has also enhanced its efforts in this arena, promoting livestreaming recruitment not only among enterprises but also local governments. Numerous county- and city-level human resources bureaus have registered with the platform.
Recruitment websites are also getting on board. In February, online marketplace 58.com added a livestreaming component to its annual Spring Festival hiring event. The featured livestreams were also run by leading companies and brands offering positions from couriers to shop clerks.
This method has helped streamline the recruitment process for companies, particularly in blue-collar jobs. Leveraging the big data, real-time interactions and visual advantages that livestreaming provides, labor-intensive enterprises can directly reach a vast pool of potential employees, expand their recruitment base and significantly reduce costs. This strategy also helps to more efficiently address labor shortages during periods of heightened demand.
For example, the weeks after Spring Festival, which generally span from late January into February, are typically peak season for blue-collar jobs. This year, Kuaishou held a “Spring Festival Job Fair” event through February, where over 40 companies and organizations livestreamed recruitment sessions.
Blue-collar workers, who represent over 50 percent of China’s total workforce of 700 million, are the primary users of these recruitment platforms. But as livestreaming recruitment evolves, its reach is expanding to other groups such as college students like Yang Mingqi and her classmates, as well as high-level professionals.