Two millennials are seen together on a music festival during Chinese National Day. (Photo : Getty Images)
A startup called DouMi is banking on the job-hop trend among Chinese millennials, who are more interested in taking part-time gigs than traditional, long-term work.
Chinese millennials' truly unique generation bodes well for the startup, a temp agency and marketing services platform that offers job hunters part-time positions.
The company has scored backing from Tencent Holdings Ltd and Baidu Inc. It doubled its monthly active users to 20 million in just six months as Chinese millennials seeking for work get accustomed to short-term jobs and employers cut labor costs, Bloomberg wrote.
The positions listed on DouMi's website are varied, including sorting boxes of milk at supermarkets or handing out pamphlets on side streets. Some can also work as live-streaming models, earning four times more than other regular jobs, Bloomberg wrote.
"Every month we have between 300,000 and 400,000 jobs," DouMi's chief executive officer Zhao Shiyong told Bloomberg. "There are a lot of younger people who say they don't want too much job security because they may not need it, because often they don't plan to stay in any one city."
The preference for these short-term jobs deviates from the conventional route that older generations in China usually take.
"Hopping from one short-term stint to another isn't the sort of aspiration an earlier generation had in China, where the middle-class dream has long been university degrees followed by a stable job--preferably one backed by the government," Bloomberg wrote.
This is backed by nearly half of the 13,000 college students polled in 2016 who said that they did not want to take a traditional job. In DouMi, students account for about half of the overall number of job seekers. About 90 percent are 35 years old or younger.
"Those born after 1990 are no longer as hardworking and uncomplaining as their parents," Bai Peiwei, an economics professor at Xiamen University, told Bloomberg. "They value freedom and leisure, and hate being restricted by superiors in traditional jobs."
One of Chinese millennials' characteristics that can be attributed to this trend is their growing desire to travel. In Banff, Alberta, restaurants and other establishments have been preparing for an influx of Chinese millennial tourists by conducting trainings and workshops among their staff.
"We know millennials will outpace any other group," Daniel Crain, an American hospitality trainer, was quoted as saying by CBC News. "The group travel will never go away, but the millennials are really taking over."
