30,000 jobseekers almost filled Pakistan's biggest stadium as its capital's police force tried to hire 1,600 new officers

• Over 30,000 people attended a recruitment event for a Pakistani police force hiring around 1,600 new staff.
• So many people applied for jobs with the Islamabad police that they two-thirds filled the country's biggest stadium.

A police force in Pakistan was so inundated with demand for new jobs that it nearly filled a soccer stadium with applicants, it said this week.

The police force of Pakistan's capital city, Islamabad, said in a tweet that over 30,000 male and female applicants turned up to take a written test for only 1,667 available positions on December 31.

There were so many applicants that they took up almost two-thirds of Pakistan's biggest stadium, the 48,000 capacity Jinnah Sports Stadium, which is usually used for soccer matches.

Thousands of applicants can be seen in video shared by news outlet Al Jazeera, sitting in the stadium, listening to announcements, and filling out tests by hand.

The staggering turnout can be attributed to the fact that nearly a third of Pakistan's youth are unemployed according to 2022 data from the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics. The institute reported in February 2022 that more than 31% of people between 15 and 29 in the country were unemployed.

PIDE said that a large number of working age people in Pakistan are not even part of the labor force, and additionally the female labor force participation rate is extremely low.

Islamabad's police force said that there has been a shortage of personnel in the past five years, and that they had approached the federal government to bulk up the force several times without success, Gulf Today reported.

The current government allowed the force to make the new recruitment of over 1,500 police constables, which will largely solve the shortage, per Gulf Today.

In a tweet, Islamabad's Inspector General of Police (IGP) Dr Akbar Nasir thanked administrative officers for running the process smoothly, and candidates for being disciplined.

Candidates who clear the written application will next be given physical tests, the police force said.