Recruiting Discrimination Still Remains; Being Graded Based on Universities

National Human Lights Commission of Korea (NHLCK) opened on October 30 the “internal recruiting standard in the selection of candidates by examining their personal histories on 2003,” which was the data from company “A,” one of the four conglomerates. According to the data, score evaluation is different between the schools. This recruiting standard was discussed during the forum to remove discrimination against academic backgrounds, being held in the NHLCK school of Seoul Jung-gu.

According to these standards, academic backgrounds, the most important factor, constitutes 35 percent of the total of candidates’ marks, with different grades for universities. It turned out that the open declaration of conglomerates, “We don’t discriminate the candidates from their academic backgrounds” was false. This is the first time that the internal recruiting standard of conglomerates was disclosed through the specific scores.

When company “A” selected candidates by examining the personal histories of the 2003 recruits, they allocated 35 points to academic backgrounds, 30 points to school record, 30 points to different languages, and 5 points to age.

They gave marks 100 points to prestigious universities such as Seoul National University, Korea University, Yonsei University, KAIST, and Pohang University of Science & Technology; 90 points to the Hanyang University, Sung Kyun Kwan and Sogang University, Kyungpook University; 80 points to the Kyunghee University and Hongik University, and 50-70 points to the other universities.

Also, they gave lower marks to branch schools than to principal schools and gave high marks to specialized colleges such as the engineering college of Inha University.

Company “A”, setting the recruiting standard as “graduated men born after 1976,” discriminated by age in selecting the candidates. They gave marks 10 points to the people born in 1977 but 5 points to the people born in 1976.

They had the vicious item such as “Except from night schools.” Even if a candidate was born before 1976, he was able to apply for company “A” if he graduated from a prestigious university.

In light of company “A”’s standard, even though a candidate had perfect scores in the school record and TOEIC respectively, he only received 82.5 points from the recruiting process in case he graduated from the local university. Meanwhile, even though a candidate had a D average and a 700 score in TOEIC, he received 84 points from the recruiting process if he graduated from a prestigious university. In other words, candidates from other universities cannot jump over the barrier of the prestigious university.

Most personnel managers in the conglomerates said that they don’t have any discrimination for the academic background officially except “preference item for men of national merits.” Even if they don’t express words, nobody knows the recruiting process except the recruiting officer.

President Hong Hoon of “Society of an Academic Clique.” stressed, “I understand that companies consider the major and school record in order to select the talented individuals, but it deprives qualified candidates from the opportunity when these companies discriminate based on their academic backgrounds.”

Kim Ho-kee, the professor of Sociology Department, Yonsei University said, “It is obvious that companies discriminates, using different recuriting system according to their universities. However actually, we cannot deny the ability of candidates from academic backgrounds. So we need to study how companies reflect candidates’ ability in a reasonable way.”

Su Young-ho, the officer of the Discrimination Research Department of NHLCK mentioned, “We know many conglomerates apply to internal standard just like company ‘A.’ we plan to persuade the personnel managers of companies to remove the discrimination standard from the academic backgrounds.”