Eight out of 10 Students from Graduating Classes Failed to Find Jobs

It is revealed that only six out of 10 graduates from the February 2004 class, and two out of 10 seniors who will be graduating in the upcoming February 2005 class have successfully found jobs.

To make matters worse, only 20 percent of industries are planning to hire new employees during the first half of 2005. Hence, the difficulty of finding jobs will continue next year.

An online employment portal website, JobLink (www.joblink.co.kr), reported on December 16 that only 64.5 percent of the surveyed 2,271 graduates of a four-year college in February 2004 have successfully found jobs.

Taking the 64.5 percent who have jobs and classified by the size of the enterprises, small- and medium-sized enterprises ranked first with 43.1 percent, venture firms 25.7 percent, large corporation 14 percent, foreign firms 10.7 percent, and public enterprises came in last with 6.5 percent.

The quality of the employment wasn’t very good, as 37.4 percent of the employment was found out to be temporary positions.

Also, as 28 percent were found to job hopped more than once, it seems that more and more job searchers are blindly turning in their resumes.

On average, job searchers applied 26.3 times, and 29.2 percent have applied more than 40 times.

Only 12.5 percent of the employees have found jobs after only one interview, and 23.1 percent have endured more than 10 interviews.

JobLink also reported that only 21.6 percent of the 1,894 undergraduates who will be graduating next February have found jobs.

Meanwhile, according to a research done by an employment information firm, Korea Recruit (www.recruit.co.kr), only 53 enterprises (19.6 percent) out of 271 major domestic enterprises are planning to recruit new employees in the first half of next year.

Do-Young Kim nirvana1@donga.com