Alibaba's online flea market draws moonlighters seeking side income in brutal job market

Alibaba Group Holding's second-hand marketplace Xianyu has launched a new feature that enables users to hire themselves out for part-time gigs, as China struggles with high youth unemployment in a bleak job market.

The function, officially launched on Tuesday, provides users with templates to quickly generate a "resume" by uploading a few photos or videos. Customers can place an order and pay, just like they would when buying items on the platform.

Those who provide more than three images or videos longer than 15 seconds are generally better at getting views, according to Xianyu, also known as Idle Fish.

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As of Wednesday, the channel featured hundreds of resumes, offering various services ranging from dancing classes and personal fitness training to graphics illustration, legal services and pet sitting.

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Lily Bi, a master's degree student and operator of Quite Studio in Xian, capital of northwest Shaanxi province, said she began using Xianyu's resume feature in June while it was still in beta testing. She offers design services for posters, logos, menus, business cards and more.

It is "very easy to upload and edit" using the resume function, which has boosted the inquiries she received by 50 per cent and led to more orders, Bi said. "I have also been paid to design other people's resumes for use on Xianyu," she said.

Bernice Bai, an apparel-industry worker, designs jewellery in her spare time and runs her own brand, Horty. She put her resume on Xianyu on Tuesday and immediately gained 40 followers.

While Bai has yet to receive any orders for her design service, she is confident that "business will come with a growing fan base".

Xiayu's new service comes as young jobseekers across China face a brutal job market. While the urban unemployment rate stood at 5 per cent in May, the jobless rate for 16 to 24-year-olds, excluding university students, was 14.2 per cent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

A job fair in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang province. Photo: Xinhua alt=A job fair in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang province. Photo: Xinhua>

Even before the launch of the resume channel, individual service providers have been using Xianyu to find customers. The online flea market, which in September posted a 20 per cent growth in daily active users from a year ago, said on Tuesday that such orders made up over 10 million yuan (US$1.38 million) worth of daily transactions, giving sellers an annual side income of more than 2,500 yuan on average.

Consulting services for graduate studies, software development and mock interviews are the most popular on Xianyu, according to the platform.

Xianyu, which was spun off and rebranded a decade ago from the used-goods channel on the Taobao marketplace, was designated by Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming last year as one of the e-commerce giant's new pillars for growth, along with wholesale platform 1688, office collaboration tool DingTalk, and search and cloud storage product Quark.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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