The dream job that will pay you £2,200 a month to travel Europe and talk to strangers

How would you like to spend two months getting paid to travel around Europe and chat to strangers?

For some it might sound like a dream job but for others the prospect of having to talk to those they don’t know would be a nightmare of epic proportions. 

This is because a lot of people, particularly the younger generations, just don’t want to talk.

Research from RiseGuide, a self-improvement app, found that 78 per cent of 2,000 people in the Generation Z and millennial age groups said poor communication had cost them money or opportunities. 

One in seven said they wouldn’t ask a stranger for help even if they were lost without a phone. 

Meanwhile, more than 40 per cent of people surveyed said they never answer their phones, while 58 per cent admitted to scripting or rehearsing a conversation before making a phone call. Nine per cent said they hadn’t spoken to another person in the past few months.

To tackle the problem head-on, RiseGuide has created a unique short-term job opportunity. It is hiring its first Global Charisma Scout. And, guess what? Talking to strangers forms a key part of the job description. 

The eight-week job will require travelling to eight cities in Europe and ranking them using criteria provided by the company. 

The successful applicant will be paid $3,000 per month, around £2,200, and RiseGuide will pay for the successful applicant’s flights, hotels and experiences. 

The successful applicant ‘will be paid to talk to strangers in the most social cities on the continent,’ RiseGuide said. 

RiseGuide’s Global Charisma Scout will visit Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, Paris and Rome as part of the trip. 

The data compiled during the eight-week role will become a published ranking showing people where it is easiest to strike up a conversation with strangers. 

The person who gets the short-term ‘social experiment’ job starting in mid-July will need to be comfortable talking to strangers in different locations, from parks to restaurants, and bars. 

An example of an assignment could be talking to five strangers at a traditional Roman espresso bar or chatting to people in a queue in Berlin. 

Every conversation has to be logged and each of the eight cities has to be ranked on the warmth of its people, their talkativeness and ‘ease of approach,’ RiseGuide said.

Ideally, with the permission of those taking part in the conversations, the successful applicant needs to document them with a photos or video. Or a keepsake like a cafe  napkin or cinema ticket could be kept. 

RiseGuide said applicants need to be able to travel in the European Union and should be ‘energetic, outgoing, independent, and love people’. 

No university degree or CV is required, it added. 

Applicants need to send RiseGuide ‘a personal introduction video and links to your social media profiles’. 

RiseGuide said: ‘We know this job sounds like a dream. But is it a dream you’re willing to get out of your comfort zone to experience? 

‘Our data says 10 per cent of people would rather pay $1,000 out of their pocket than speak in public. We’re offering you a chance to prove that data wrong.’

It added: ‘Traditional job filters select for conformity, and conformity is the opposite of what this role needs’.

Recent official figures showed more than one million young people in Britain are not in education, employment or training, the highest level in more than 12 years.  

Job and career opportunities for young people are ‘not growing, they’re shrinking’, with one in six set to be out of work, education or training in five years unless action is taken, a recent review into youth unemployment found.

‘We are at risk of a lost generation,’ Alan Milburn, the report’s author and a former minister, said in May. 

Milburn said rejections for young jobseekers, after submitting dozens, sometimes hundreds of applications, had become the norm and challenged a characterisation that young people were not trying or were ‘work-shy, snowflakes, soft’. 

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