We’ve heard of jumping through hoops to get a job, but literally walking through them is another thing entirely.

A new boutique hotel in Melbourne is going to some particularly long lengths to get job applicants to prove their keenness to work there.

The new QT Hotel on Russell Street is set to open in September, built on the site of the old, beloved, thoroughly crappy, magnificently art deco, and sorely missed Russell Street Greater Union Cinema. The self-professed “quirky” hotel chain already has sites in the Sydney CBD, Bondi, Canberra, Port Douglas, the Gold Coast, and Falls Creek. The Melbourne hotel is the company’s first expansion into the Victorian capital.

But those who were keen to pick up work at the huge new building are well and truly being put through the ringer, with those who lined up from 6am on Monday morning (seriously) asked to, among other things, re-create the famous walk off scene from ‘Zoolander‘ (again, seriously).

The multi-stage interview process is called an “audition” by the hotel, with yesterday’s catwalk-inspired phase one being the “pre-show.”

The catwalking, blue steeling, hopefully-not-underwear-removing first stage was conducted to “show their charisma, their attitude towards the role and also their dedication to the role,” according to QT’s PR director Stephen Howard.

Should those game enough to walk that aisle manage to work it hard enough, they would then progress through to the next stage of the interview process: a one-on-one interview. And if they make it through that part, they score an invitation to a cocktail party, designed not so much as a celebration of scoring the job, but to gauge “how they react within a social environment, with their fellow employees, how they react around food and drink and within the environment of managers as well,” because lord knows there’s not a more professional combination in the world than job-related uncertainty, anxiety, pressure, and alcohol. Not a damned thing has ever gone bung when that lot is mixed.

All that said, it was estimated that around 1,000-odd applicants lined up for a chance to work for the “hip” hotel brand, in roles as diverse as receptionists, porters, wait staff, kitchen hands, and something called a Director of Chaos which sounds less like an ordinary hotel position and more like the head of a supervillain conglomerate.

The hotel is set to open its doors in September. We can only assume that if someone managed to hit a perfect Magnum that they’d be hired on the spot.

Source: The Age.