[K-Women Talk] My Daughter Should Explore 'Unknown Companies'

My college student niece really worked hard. She used Navyism, which tells the server time, to register for classes 0.5 seconds ahead of others. In her second semester of freshman year, she went to the school’s career preparation office to take a career assessment, believing it would help with employment. During vacations, she balanced a cafe part-time job and language school, maintained an average grade of A- while double majoring, and even earned a computer proficiency certificate. That’s not all. She spent four years of college packed with team projects, contests, and extracurricular activities. The employment result? 19 attempts, 19 failures. She is still “preparing for employment.”

Let’s review the common stories of job seekers. What was lacking? According to employment experts’ diagnoses, there are two reasons. First, she thought of job hunting like college entrance exams. College entrance exams are structured around submitting your school grades and CSAT scores to an admission chart created by specialized institutions. There are only 336 universities nationwide, and you just apply to the university that matches your scores. Almost no one applies by analyzing the differences between Business Administration at University A and University B, nor is there a need to.

How about job hunting? There is no common exam, and of course, no ranking chart of companies. Above all, there are 7 million companies nationwide. There are about 9,000 large corporations and over 5,000 mid-sized companies. Instead of a single line, there are countless lines, each with distinct characteristics and required competencies. You have to create your own company ranking chart, decide which line to stand in, and then meet the criteria. But my niece started by making scores as if it were an entrance exam.

The second reason is that she unconditionally stood in a long line with many people. Her application list contained “companies everyone knows.” Although she applied evenly to large corporations, foreign companies, and mid-sized companies, they were all well-known companies. Naturally, there were too many competitors. Well-known consumer goods companies adopted difficult screening processes such as video self-introductions, role-playing, and individual presentations to evaluate numerous applicants. This only raised the difficulty of job hunting without increasing the chances of acceptance.

As mentioned earlier, there are about 14,000 mid-sized or larger companies and about 2,500 listed companies in Korea. Most people can probably name only about 100 companies out of these. My niece also passed over “unknown companies” among the many job postings on employment portals. Among the companies she filtered out were global top 100 companies by market capitalization, the US Big 3 bio companies, and promising startups favored by investors. The salaries, work-life balance, welfare, and growth potential of the companies she didn’t know and skipped were much better than those she applied to, and the difficulty of employment was lower. But she fought a bloody frog battle inside a well.

Food and pharmaceutical companies that advertise a lot on TV often have lower salaries and welfare levels than IT or chemical industries. The same goes for foreign companies. The average salary of famous luxury brands is often lower than that of lesser-known auto parts companies, but the competition rate is excessively high. An HR manager at a global company headquartered in Germany said, “There were few applicants because the company name was long and difficult, but after adding the subtitle ‘Fortune 100 semiconductor equipment company,’ the number of applicants increased significantly.” This is a clear example of our level of corporate knowledge.

How can my niece win on her 20th attempt? She needs to pause her “hard work” and first explore which line she should stand in. Next, she should create a list of companies that are large and strong but still relatively quiet, companies her friends don’t yet know, and challenge those. There are tens of times more hidden gem companies that are less known than the companies we know.

Lee Suk-eun, CEO of Lee’s Bookstore

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