In January, the finance ministry said it would have public agencies take in more than 55 percent of their full-year target of 19,862 new hirings in the first half of the year in order to offer quality openings to young jobseekers.

The plan came as South Korea remains dogged by high youth joblessness. The unemployment rate for young people aged between 15 and 29 reached 11.2 percent in April, compared with its headline jobless rate of 4.2 percent.

Despite their failure to achieve the first-quarter employment goal, the country's public agencies are widely expected to expand hiring considerably for the remainder of the year.

Some watchers said the public institutions' employment for all of this year may exceed last year's 21,000, which represented a record high, given the Moon Jae-in administration's push to create more jobs in the public sector.

Moon of the liberal Democratic Party of Korea, who took office May 10 after winning the snap presidential election the previous day, has promised to create 810,000 new quality jobs in the public sector during his five-year presidency. (Yonhap)