Around 100 women out of the 2,000 original applicants in Beijing competing for a matchmaking job with an annual salary of 250,000 yuan plus a car had interviews in the capital on Thursday.
The job, titled love hunter, requires the ability to spot and recommend suitable single ladies for Golden Bachelor Matchmakers, a high-end matchmaking company based in Shanghai.
"We hire single beautiful women to do this job because we believe they are surrounded by single beautiful friends," Xu Tianli, chairman of the company, told METRO on Thursday.
The recruitment targets attractive single women who are between 165 cm and 173 cm tall and aged between 20 and 28. The winner, to be announced on July 25, will be offered a 250,000-yuan annual salary and a Mini Cooper priced at 250,000 yuan.
The national recruitment kicked off in Shanghai in May, and attracted around 12,000 women. The Beijing interviews on Thursday were the fifth stop for the ongoing recruitment.
Wang Yundong, head of the company's Beijing branch, who interviewed the 112 applicants on Thursday, said the job requires top communication skills because love hunters get rejected very often.
"They need to go to shopping malls and universities to find young ladies all the time. They have to find out whether their subjects are single or not during conversations," she said, adding that love hunters fail 70 percent of time when they try to persuade strangers on the streets to become their potential resource.
Potential love hunters have their sights set on the money
Ren Li, 22, a junior student majoring in broadcasting and anchoring at Communication University of China, confessed that she applied for the job due to the high salary.
Ren said she was confident of passing the interview because her friends often ask her to find girlfriends or boyfriends for them.
Sun Yuhan, 20, a flight attendant major graduate, who was also attracted by the salary, said: "I've learned how to deal with complaints from passengers. I believe it is a suitable job for me."
Golden Bachelor Matchmakers was founded in 2005 and has around 11,000 high-end members and millions of ordinary members from all over China. According to Xu, 90 percent of the high-end members are male, while the majority of ordinary members are female.
High-end members pay 100,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan for a one-year contract in order to find suitable life partners.
"It is not like they use money to find true love. They just want to have the best options," he said, adding most small matchmaking companies in China don't have enough single 'resources' and cannot offer professional advice about marriage.
"The number of single people, especially those who are excellent in every field, is running out quickly. That's why we need love hunters to renew our resource pool all the time," he said.
The company currently has around 100 professional love hunters, looking for suitable matches for their clients. Around 10 percent of them can earn 300,000 yuan to 500,000 yuan per year. The rest of them have a monthly salary of around 3,000 yuan. Once they successfully find the right person for the high-end clients, the bonus can reach 1 million yuan.
