By Jane Han
Staff Reporter

It didn't take long for Jin Tae-yong, who runs a fitness center in downtown Seoul, to find a part-timer to clean up the ice and slush piled up around his building from this week's record snowfall. He put up a posting on a job site and, within a day, had nearly 30 applicants calling in.

"I only needed one person," said Jin, who pays 7,000 won per hour, "but it was nice to have such a large pool of candidates to choose from."

He said everyone from high school students to homemakers showed interest in the week-long job to tidy up his business site.

While the job is manual labor, many people are attracted to the work.

"It's active and uncommon," said an official of Albamon, an online employment site specializing in part-time jobs.

She said the recent blizzard, which dumped more than 25 centimeters of snow on Seoul, opened up all kinds of odd cleaning jobs.

And among them, snow shoveling is considered one of the hottest part-time stints on the market.

The Albamon official said college students currently on winter vacation take up the lion's share of job seekers looking for something fun and financially rewarding.

In that sense, cleaning up snow beats answering phones or serving food all day, she says, adding that the pay is better too.

Typical part-time jobs pay an average of 4,000 to 4,500 won per hour, but the snow jobs pay anywhere from 6,000 to 8,000 won, based on the listings posted in the past few days.

One middle school in Bucheon, for example, is willing to pay 50,000 won for six hours of snow shoveling, according to Albamon.

The recruiter expects to see a rise in more snow-related job openings over the next few weeks as businesses are struggling to clean up the mess caused by the latest storm, which was the heaviest fall since records began more than 70 years ago.

jhan@koreatimes.co.kr