Monday, March 29, 2010

Korean Job Market: Character Over GPA?

In Korean, the strong emphasis on education / a high GPA (grade point average) is seen as crucial to get accepted in a top university, which will in turn lead to being hired by a top company. This survey points to other factors strongly influencing the hiring process. That said, I feel that one reason with most applicants sporting high GPA and strong academic credentials, so it's Character that sets them apart.

Chosun Ilbo notes---Businesses place more importance on a job applicant's character than their track record, a poll by employment portal Job Korea of 255 companies that are planning to hire new staff in the first half of this year finds.

Some 69.4 percent gave more weight to the character of applicants rather than their career or educational backgrounds. In other words, experience counted with less than one-third of companies. And 70.6 percent of the respondents named the personality of job applicants among decisive factors in hiring them, followed by work experience (50.6 percent), educational specialty (24.7 percent), first impression (14.1 percent), fluency in English or another foreign language (9.8 percent), the school applicants graduated from (5.9 percent) and special skills (3.1 percent).

The most popular attribute of job applicants was patience for 18.4 percent, diligence (15.3 percent), creativity 14.9 percent), ability to solve problems (12.9 percent) and loyalty to the company (12.2 percent).

The most unpopular attribute was disloyalty for 34.5 percent of the companies, followed by irresponsibility (18 percent), selfishness (10.6 percent) and lack of initiative (9.4 percent).

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous2:19 PM

    Well,

    In previous days, since competition is so high, they received thousands of applications for just a few posts. Thus, the process for hiring for a certain company which is perenially top 5 was a seven step process of which I'll explain three:

    1) Educational background: top five school or resume goes into the garbage;

    2) Character: The manners they exhibit, courtesy, family background;

    3) Loyalty: This was usually measured by how loyal you are to your family. One way to quantify was whether the applicant can write not only their parents but also grandparents name in chinese character;

    Tough country...

    Daniel Lafontaine

    ReplyDelete