Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Only through us can we guarantee you blue-eyed non-criminals

And for the third week in a row (after this entry and this entry) Bizplace posted a nice advertisement vaguely disguised as an 'article' yesterday (it's listed as 'news' under a Naver search):
"Filtering through a specialized company's proven system" [when] hiring native speaking English instructors

Currently the number of native speaking English specialist instructors working in Korea has surpassed 25,000. Due to the demand for English education the number of native speaking English instructors is gradually increasing. However there have been not a few cases of some qualification-deficient instructors causing crimes like bringing in drugs or sex scandals. [...]

If one does not comply with the recruitment process based on accurate information, one could hire someone who is illegal or 'unqualified,' who has submitted false information, as a native speaking English instructor. The possibility of a serious crime being committed at any time cannot be ruled out. Therefore, in order to prevent such mistakes, there is increasing demand for a verification system for hiring native speaking instructors. Nevertheless, the truth is that it's not easy to distinguish good from bad [instructors]. [...]

Han Chang-gyun, spokesperson for the native speaking instructor recruiting company Job and Consulting (www.jobnco.com), advised that if you go through an approved agency which complies with legal E-2 issuing procedures when it comes time to hire an native speaking instructor, you can prevent the harm that could happen after [hiring] a unqualified or illegal sojourner.
The ending is quite similar to last week's edition:
Han Chang-gyun, spokesperson for the native speaking instructor recruiting company Job and Consulting (www.jobnco.com), advised that if you go through an government approved agency which complies with legal E-2 issuing procedures when it comes time to hire an native speaking instructor, you can be safe from harm [caused by] illegal native speaking instructors.
Which is similar to the week before that:
Lee Tae-u, head of the native speaking instructor recruiting company Job and Consulting (www.jobnco.com), advised, "Currently it's estimated that there are 25,000 native speaking instructors staying in Korea, and if you go through an agency which complies with legal employment procedures when it comes time to choose an native speaking instructor, you can thoroughly prevent the harm caused by illegal native speaking instructors.
Harm, harm, and more harm. They're certainly consistent. But yesterday's piece pushing things a bit further by saying "The possibility of a serious crime being committed at any time cannot be ruled out." Which makes sense, of course, because they're westerners. If I was to say such a thing about Koreans I'd - justifiably - be called a racist and asshole, but apparently doing so here - against westerners - is just good business sense. In fact, the day the first advertisement went up, Job&Consulting posted on their site a thank you to hagwon owners and school principals for their support and wrote that, "Currently we have requests for interviews and there are intensive reports in various news and media."

Oh, and the term translated as 'unqualified' was not the usual '무자격,' but rather '자격미달.' Here are the example sentences for 자격미달 given by Naver's online dictionary (click to enlarge):


I've seen the last sentence elsewhere on Naver's dictionary with 무자격 외국인강사 (unqualified foreign teachers) instead of the 'unqualified teachers' seen above. Times core, which provided the sentences, seems to be responsible for many such example sentences, but I'll save a closer look at that for another time.



As for the pictures of western women that appeared next to the stories in the Naver search results, it turns out the source of these is the Job&Consulting site itself, where the following photos are cycled through:







Close-ups of the women (and diploma), and shots from a distance (or behind) of the men. The banner version of the photos of two of the women focuses on one particular attribute:



No focus on certain racial attributes there, right?

They're also nice enough to provide contact information on their site, apparently for those who want to send them resumes.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm so confused. Some days I'm a blond, green-eyed model of Aryan charm and others I'm a dope-smoking ajumma kicker.

Anonymous said...

These individuals must be highly qualified English teachers. Surely a company this intent on preventing "a serious crime being committed" by someone who had no qualifications or connection to teaching but just "looked the part" wouldn't try to pull the same con by surfing the web for racial traits they thought symbolized linguistic competence for their gulible customers.

1: A, B.
2: A, B.
3: A, B, C.

Kamiza said...

I am a tall, male, blond-haired, blue-eyed American English teacher, and boy is it nice to be in the upper ranks of this wonderful society.

Bow to me young English-seeker!
One gaze of my blue eyes will give you instant results on that TOEIC test. You'll land that dream job at Hyundai or Samsung with just one look!

Stuart said...

Many recruiters are nothing more than parasites.

My recent bad experience with a recruiter, was when I was looking for a new job a couple of years ago. I posted my CV to many recruiters who were offering jobs.

90% of them never replied. I found a number of months later that one of them that never replied to me had pasted half of my CV on their company website in the public space for anybody to see, without my permission. There were hundreds of other foreign teacher's CVs on that website and I doubt that any of them gave them permission to post the CVs on there.

I can only assume that they are still there.

matt said...

wetcasements:
If I ever start a band, the last 4 words of your comment might inspire its name.

B_Wagner:
Amazing find. I'll have to update the post.

Stuart:
The three Ps of recruiting - 'privacy', 'permission' and parasite. Perhaps, on the latter note, they could choose new, more self reflective images for their website like this or this (or they could be more honest with something like this, or especially this).