"74% of Large Corporations Have No Plans for New Hiring in the Second Half of the Year" ... Impact of COVID-19

[Asia Economy Reporter Changhwan Lee] Due to the impact of the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19), three out of four large corporations have either not planned any new hires for the second half of this year or will not hire even a single person, according to a survey.

On the 6th, the Korea Economic Research Institute announced that it recently commissioned Research & Research, a polling agency, to survey the top 500 companies by sales regarding their new hiring plans for the second half of this year. The results showed that half (50.0%) of the total responding companies (120 companies) said they had not set any new hiring plans. Among them, 24.2% said they would not hire any new employees in the second half.

Among the large corporations that did set new hiring plans for the second half (25.8% of total respondents), only 22.6% said they would increase the scale of hiring compared to last year. The majority (77.4%) planned to reduce or maintain a similar hiring scale as last year.

When asked why they could not increase new college graduate hires, 69.8% of the responding companies cited the worsening domestic and international economy and industry conditions due to the impact of COVID-19. Internal demand shortages such as an increase in idle personnel (7.5%) followed.

Companies anticipated changes in the hiring market for the second half, including an increase in untact (contactless) hiring adoption (27.9%), expansion of irregular hiring proportions (26.1%), strengthening of experienced hires (20.2%), expansion of new hiring using artificial intelligence (AI) (13.6%), and increased hiring in the Fourth Industrial Revolution sectors (6.6%).

In particular, more than half (54.2%) of large corporations have already introduced untact hiring (19.2%) or are considering its introduction (35.0%) in response to COVID-19.

The proportion of irregular hiring was also high. Among all responding companies, 22.5% said they use 100% irregular hiring without any open recruitment, and 30.0% said they combine irregular hiring with open recruitment.

Choo Kwang-ho, Director of Economic Policy at the Korea Economic Research Institute, emphasized, "The youth employment market is heading toward the worst situation ever due to the combined effects of reduced hiring capacity caused by deteriorating corporate performance and the lack of incentives for new hiring due to employment rigidity."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.