South Korea's public corporations plan to hire 17,187 new employees in 2015, up 2.9 percent from this year, as every effort is made to create jobs vital for sustainable growth, the government said Friday.

   The latest hiring target set by the 302 state-run enterprises and quasi-government agencies comes after the number of people hired by the public sector has been growing gradually since 2011, the finance ministry said.

   In 2011, 9,538 people were hired, with that number going up to 14,452 in the following year and 15,372 in 2013. For this year, state-managed companies and organizations hired 16,701 new people.

   For 2015, the ministry said that the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. and Korea Electric Power Corp. plan to hire more than 1,000 employees. Other large companies such as Seoul National University Hospital and Korea Railroad Corp. plan to hire several hundred workers.

   Seoul has stressed boosting employment numbers as a key economic goal with public sector hiring aiming to augment the number of people being hired by private companies.

   The finance ministry projected that 66.2 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 64 will be employed in 2015, up from

65.3 percent this year. The incumbent Park Geun-hye administration has said it wants the country to reach 70 percent employment within its five-year term that ends in early 2018.

   Despite the overall rise in hiring, the number of high school graduates to be hired is expected to stand at just 1,722, or 10 percent of the total. The number of corporations and agencies hiring high school graduates has been tallied at 134.

   This is backtracking from targets set by the previous Lee Myung-bak administration, which aimed to set a 20 percent quota that would be pushed up to 40 percent by 2016.

   Related to the lower percentage of high school graduates being hired, the finance ministry claimed it recommended a 20 percent limit, but companies have their own requirements.

   Of the companies hiring high school graduates in the new year, the largest employer is KEPCO, which has positions for 240 people.

This was followed by 162 for KHNP and 159 for Kangwon Land Co. (Yonhap)