Evidence of how hard it is to land a job in the recession is showing up at a Taipei funeral home, which on Saturday hired 30 people to serve as apprentice morticians after receiving nearly 1,300 applications for the job.
Lien Fu-yu (連富玉), a human resources official at Lungyen Group (龍巖集團), said the number of applications this year was more than double last year’s 600, the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported yesterday.
The company first selected 127 candidates, all of them college graduates, to take written tests after a preliminary review of the 1,300 applicants.
ETIQUETTE
It dropped 69 candidates after the written test and required the remaining 58 to join a last round of interviews that was to test their etiquette and manners, the paper said.
The company pays a starting salary of NT$25,000 per month for an apprentice mortician, and raises it to NT$60,000 or NT$70,000 a year after the apprentice gains a full-time position.
Many of the candidates are less than 30 years old. Twenty-six-year-old Hsu Yu-lun (�?�) was one of the lucky 30.
She told the newspaper the salary was attractive and her family did not object to her working in the profession.
Hsu earlier worked in the financial services industry and recently finished a language study program in the US.
‘DEPARTURES’
Some candidates performed poorly on the final interview because they said they had not seen the Japanese film Departures and couldn’t answer questions related to necessary ceremonies and rituals, the Chinese-language United Daily News said.
Departures won the Best Foreign Language Film prize at this year’s Academy Awards on Feb. 22. The movies features an unemployed cellist who becomes an apprentice mortician, learning about life and death in the process.
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