Despite their reputation as one of the world’s most liberal countries, Sweden’s Employment Services’ (Arbetsförmedlingen) website has taken down a job advert from a company seeking testers for its sex toys, reports thelocal.se.

The advert, which was posted on Monday, was seeking applications for “driven and methodical sex toy testers” with “patience and a passion for technical equipment”.

The advert invited candidates who ideally had "previous experience of pleasure" to submit their CVs. Successful applicants would be asked to collect discreetly-packaged sex toys from their nearest post office, before testing and reviewing them. Applicants were also asked to be educated to at least high school level, to have good Swedish language levels and a basic knowledge of Excel.

The wording for the advert had been agreed with Arbetsförmedlingen prior to it being posted on the website. However, the agency decided to pull the advert for fear that it might cause offence.

Tobias Lundqvist, founder of the adult entertainment shop, Oliver and Eva, commented: “We contacted them in advance since we knew that this was a very unusual advert. So we spoke with them by email and on the phone and they even ran it past their lawyers.”

Pär Netsman, a spokesperson for Arbetsförmedlingen told The Local: "We took the advert away because some people could feel that sex toys are offensive."

The Stockholm-based entrepreneur said he was "confused and disappointed" that the agency decided to take the position off its website: "We just got a very short message from Arbetsförmedlingen saying they had removed the advert because they have the right to take things down that might cause offence.”

Removing the advert, however, has not stopped the company from being inundated with applications. The advert was shared more than 37,000 times on Facebook by Wednesday afternoon.

Mr Lindqvist said that at one point he was receiving an application every 20 seconds and woke up on Thursday to 14,000 unread emails.