Public Organizations Change the Way They Hire Employees

According to the government’s plan, public organizations which move to local provinces after the year 2011 are required to increase the number of employees hailing from the designated provinces which include the place the organizations will move to. The provinces are divided into “Gyeongnam•Busan•Ulsan”; “Gyeongbuk•Daeku”; “Jeonbuk”; “Jeonnam•Gwangju”; “Chungbuk”; “Chungnam•Daejeon”; “Gangwon”; and “Jeju.”

For instance, the Korea Electric Power Corporation, which is going to move to “Jeonnam•Gwangju,” should hire a certain number of employees from that area every year.

Public organizations will give applicants priority according to their last school background. If a person is a graduate of a high school in Chungbuk and a university in Seoul, he won’t be given priority when he applies for public organizations which plan to move to Chungbuk.

Public organizations should submit to the Ministry of Planning and Budget a detailed plan on their employment.

The TOEIC will be given less importance -

The ministry asked companies to give more weight to interviews. The ministry did so considering that interviews have only served as a means to assess applicants’ characters and to screen out unqualified ones, failing to be fully exploited in choosing talents suitable for public agencies.

Besides placing more importance on interviews, the Ministry of Planning and Budget also came up with a plan to increase the number of successful test-takers in the written test. Interview methods will be diversified as well. The new methods include group discussion and an “interview with no information” where interviewers are going to carry out interviews without any personal information on applicants.

In addition, other qualifications such as gender, age, school background, physical conditions will be eliminated in principle. Information on school background will only be asked when applicants apply for certain positions, such as researching jobs.

The way to examine documents will be also diversified. Public institutions must take into account what applicants did, such as volunteer work and internship as well as school record and foreign language proficiency. In particular, the ministry asked to give less importance on the records of certified English tests such as TOEIC.

The key is how to guarantee objectiveness-

These new employment plans will be applied to 298 public organizations including public companies, semi-government agencies, and other public organizations.

Some 100 public companies and semi-government agencies are obliged to comply with the new plans and submit to the ministry their own plans on how to improve their employment practice. The rest are allowed to implement the plans in a flexible manner. However, increasing the proportion of interviews in hiring employees risks losing objectiveness, and giving special treatment to those from local provinces is likely to bring about discrimination against those from Seoul.

Lee Gwang-seok, president of Incruit, said, “Private companies have already given weight to interviews and placed less importance on foreign language proficiency, but public organizations should be careful in hiring employees to prevent any conflict from occurring.”

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