When David Swan, an expert with 10 years of experience in the recruitment industry, came to Korea, he was surprised to see Korean job candidates entering the labor force relatively later than its neighboring Asian countries.

What he witnessed in Korea was a large number of young job seekers, who are highly educated and overqualified, aiming for jobs that are in short supply or waiting for a job they want.

Swan, who has served as managing director of global recruitment consulting firm Robert Walters‘ Korea and Japan Office, pointed to the growing mismatch between young people’s career expectations and available jobs as one of the biggest challenges facing the Korean labor market in an interview with The Korea Herald. 

Robert Walters Korea, a Seoul branch of the London-based outsourcing firm, has provided recruitment services to local job candidates and clients -- mostly Seoul-based foreign firms and foreign embassies -- in various industries since its opening in 2010.

“I think the expectations that the young generation brings to the workforce are not realistic,” Swan said. “A lot of their expectations about life at workplaces have been built around examples like Facebook and Google. They imagine that workplaces would be about coming up with the greatest ideas to change the world.”

According to him, easier access to information on the back of the high-speed internet has worsened a mismatch between the supply of graduates and employers’ needs, not only in Korea, but also around the world.

“This generation didn’t have to not know anything. As soon as they don‘t know anything, they go to the internet. So they need to be certain when they (can) get the first promotion or become a CEO of their companies,” he said. “But the current (economic) structure cannot provide a lot of the certainty they desire and that’s why the millennial generation quits a job so quickly.”

In South Korea, nearly one in three newly hired employees (27.7 percent) quit within a year, according to a 2016 survey on 306 firms by the Korea Employer’s Federation. The poll showed that 49.1 percent of them left work after failing to adapt to their companies, followed by those discontent with the pay and welfare (20 percent) and those unhappy with their work environment (15.9 percent).

The mismatch in Korea might be more extreme, due to a social atmosphere focusing on years-long higher education and worries over poor working conditions at small and medium-sized companies.

According to a survey on 11,155 SMEs released last year by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Resources, 95.3 percent of the job vacancies were concentrated in the companies with less than 500 employees.

A survey by a recruitment firm Saramin this year found that 8 in 10 companies had not been able to hire enough people. Of them, 34.6 percent said that they could not even fill 10 percent of their job vacancies.

For job seekers, employment stability (37.1 percent) and salary (31.8 percent) were the biggest reasons behind their reluctance to enter jobs at SMEs, according to another survey by a job search engine Job Korea on 1,231 job seekers.

Swan advised job seekers to lower their expectations slightly. Unlike some young CEOs who did not have to work their way up with their innovative business models, in reality, most people should put in years of hard work and get on with what they do to move up the corporate ladder and achieve success, he said.

“The government should also offer better career education to inform them of job opportunities while providing support to improve working conditions and prospects and SMEs,” he said.

To boost the productivity of workers and create more jobs for women and youth, the South Korean labor market and company culture should become more flexible and performance-based, Swan pointed out.

“The labor market here is very rigid and overprotects permanent employees,” he said, advocating the Korean government’s push for labor market reforms. The right-wing Saenuri Party put forward bills to reduce working hours, expand industries where irregular workers can be hired and extend the contract length of workers, though they have been stalled at the parliament.

“If companies cannot get rid of underperforming employees, each hiring becomes a big risk. They then hire temporary workers to avoid the risk,” he said. “Overprotecting permanent employees and reducing the amount of contract workers cannot go together.”

“If companies are able to fire people who are not performing well in the job and hire new people who are more fit and enthusiastic about the job, it would increase productivity and generate more jobs overall.”

For the Korean economy to survive in the years to come, Asia’s fourth largest economy needs to learn from the mistakes its neighbor Japan has made and the steps it has taken, he stressed.

“I think the Korean job market has a lot of similarities with Japan. The closest things are that both countries are very hierarchical, seniority-based in terms of promotion and salaries. They underutilize their female workforce and face issues with an aging society,” said Swan, who has also headed Robert Walters’ Japan Office since 2009.

“In Japan, the workforce began to shrink a couple of years ago. In Korea, it will start sometime between 2020 and 2030. Korea‘s working population will drop much faster than Japan’s has,” he said. “I think Korea should start to think now about accepting migrant workers and maximizing the use of female workforce.”

Amid the falling birth rate, South Korea will need to receive 1.6 million immigrants by 2020 and 11.8 million by 2050 to offset the fall in the economically active population, a 2014 report by Korea Economic Institute showed.

“In many ways Japanese companies are moving faster than their Korean counterparts when it comes to internationalization. They use more English at the workplace and implement progressive polices for women and sexual minorities, for example,” he said.

In the age of robots and Artificial Intelligence, the recruitment expert assured that people do not have to fear job losses.

“Jobs will disappear and will be recreated. Looking back on history, new jobs have sprung up when jobs have been replaced by computers. There are plenty of opportunities for new jobs to rise,” he said.

It is probably high time to ditch an idea of lifetime jobs and learn to redefine their careers every few years as changes are inevitable, he pointed out.

“Once you started as an accountant, you retired as an accountant doing the same sort of work. But I don’t think that will exist anymore. It is an old-fashioned idea that you graduate from university and you stop receiving education,” he said.

“As time goes on, people need to redefine their skills on a regular basis,” he said. “People should keep an eye on what’s going on and challenge themselves with new things to survive.”

By Ock Hyun-ju (laeticia.ock@heraldcorp.com)