Criticism that recruitment practices without even application results prolong job searches... The blind spots of workplaces with fewer than 30 employees and Article 10 of the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act, which has notification obligations but no sanctions, must be addressed first

People Waiting Without Knowing Application Results

Ms. Choi, a 29-year-old woman who began job hunting in earnest this year, submitted job applications to around 100 companies from January to this month. She stated that she received contact informing her of passing the document screening from only three companies, while most of the remaining companies quietly closed their job postings or let the application deadlines pass without notifying her of the document screening results. Choi mentioned that while senior job seekers told her that a lack of passing notification meant rejection, the phrase 'individual contact for successful document applicants' written on job postings made it impossible to judge whether the screening process had ended or was still ongoing, sometimes causing her to pore over the same posting for over a month and delay other applications.

The situation for Mr. Park, a 39-year-old man living in Incheon, is largely similar. Having left his company late last year after working in production management at a manufacturing firm for over 10 years, Park applied for experienced positions at nearly 60 companies in the first half of this year alone. He stated that although he reached the interview stage at five of these companies, only two notified him of his hiring status after the interviews. The remaining three companies reportedly failed to follow up with calls or texts despite stating during the interviews that they would announce results within the week, and Park only learned that someone else had already been hired after contacting the human resources manager directly. Park vented that with his unemployment benefit period coming to an end, each recruitment case with unknown results became an obstacle in establishing his next job search plan.

The experiences of these two individuals cannot be dismissed as instances of bad personal luck. As the preparation period for employment grows longer, the number of companies job seekers must apply to simultaneously increases. As more recruitments proceed without result notifications, job seekers are placed in a state of uncertain waiting without knowing which applications remain active and which have ended. Because an accumulation of such waiting times can prolong the overall job hunting period, the practice of non-notification can be seen as one of several factors influencing the prolongation of job searches.

Youth Employment Declines for 45 Consecutive Months, Document Pass Rates Fall Below 20%

Behind the 'recruitment without response' experienced by job seekers lies a narrowed employment gate. According to the 'July 2026 Employment Trends' released by the National Statistics Office on the 12th, employed persons aged 15 and older in July stood at 29,136,000, up 108,000 from a year earlier. However, youth employment for those aged 15 to 29 fell by 191,000 to 3,441,000, continuing a downward trend for 45 consecutive months. The youth employment rate dropped 1.6 percentage points year-on-year to 44.2%, recording a decline for 27 straight months. The youth unemployment rate rose 1.3 percentage points to 6.8%, marking the largest increase since January 2021, which was 5 years and 6 months ago, and the number of unemployed youth increased by 41,000 to 251,000. The National Statistics Office explained that this partially reflected the concentration of job-seeking activities such as civil service examinations during the surveyed week, but it appears clear that recruitment demand is failing to keep pace with the increasing number of youths seeking jobs.

The probability of passing relative to applications is also declining. According to the '2025 College Student Employment Perception Survey' released by the Federation of Korean Industries in December of last year (targeting 2,492 current students and graduates of four-year universities nationwide), job-seeking preparation students actively engaged in job hunting submitted job applications an average of 13.4 times per year, but the number of times they passed document screenings averaged only 2.6. This brought the document pass rate down to 19.4%, a 2.2 percentage point drop from the previous year (22.2%), and 62.6% of respondents expected job preparations to take six months or longer. In the same survey, 6 out of 10 job preparation students (60.5%) were classified as 'passive job seekers' with low employment expectations, and a majority of them (51.8%) cited a lack of jobs as the reason for not engaging in active job-seeking activities.

The figure of an average of 13 to 14 applications is limited to current students and graduates of four-year universities, diverging from the field-level reality where job seekers applying to nearly 100 places like Choi is not uncommon. However, given that an increasing number of applications also increases the number of application cases with unknown results, the decline in document pass rates and the practice of non-notification can be seen as factors that simultaneously heighten the burden on job seekers.

Surveys dealing directly with rejection notices themselves consist mostly of relatively old data. In a survey released by JobKorea in October 2019 (targeting 1,862 job preparation students with application experience), 51.5% of respondents reported receiving no notification from companies where they failed after final interviews. Based on JobKorea's findings, the proportion of receiving rejection notices by company type was led by large enterprises at the 70% level, public enterprises at the 50% level, foreign-affiliated companies at the 40% level, and small and medium-sized enterprises at the 30% level, showing that smaller company sizes correlated with lower notification rates. In a survey conducted by JobKorea the same year targeting 364 human resources managers, 61% responded that they did not provide separate notifications to rejected applicants. Although the situation may have improved somewhat with the subsequent spread of batch notification functions on recruitment platforms, no major recent official surveys confirm whether the past figures showing half of final-interviewed job seekers failing to hear results have changed significantly.

Article 10 of the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act: Obligations Exist, But Sanctions Do Not

Rejection notices are not a matter left to the goodwill of companies but an obligation already stipulated by law. Article 10 of the 'Act on Fair Incorporation in Recruitment' (Fair Recruitment Procedure Act), enacted and enforced in January 2014, stipulates that when an employer finalizes recruitment targets, they must notify job seekers of their employment status without delay. The Ministry of Employment and Labor's operational manual and the practical guidelines of recruitment platforms also explain that the practice of notifying only successful applicants while omitting rejected applicants constitutes a violation of Article 10. The intent of this provision is to allow job seekers to quickly confirm their rejection status and apply to other recruitments.

The problem is that when this obligation is violated, Article 10 itself lacks direct grounds for fines or corrective orders, meaning inspections by the Ministry of Employment and Labor have been handled centered around improvement recommendations. While the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act prescribes criminal punishment for false recruitment advertisements, fines of up to 30 million won for unfair solicitations, pressure, coercion, or bribery related to recruitment, and fines of up to 5 million won for demanding personal information unrelated to job duties or disadvantageously altering working conditions presented in job ads, it does not establish corresponding direct sanction provisions for failing to notify recruitment results. Furthermore, current laws only regulate result notifications after the final recruitment targets are finalized and do not explicitly specify result notification deadlines for each screening stage, such as document screenings and interviews. As a result, situations where job seekers eliminated at the document stage wait without knowing the results are difficult to capture through current provisions alone.

The scope of application is also narrow. The Fair Recruitment Procedure Act applies to businesses or workplaces regularly employing 30 or more workers, as well as national and local governments (excluding public official recruitment) and public institutions, while workplaces regularly employing fewer than 30 employees are entirely excluded from the application target. Recalling that small and medium-sized enterprises had the lowest proportion of receiving rejection notices in the previous JobKorea survey, this means the areas with the poorest notifications lie outside the law.

The inspection results of the Ministry of Employment and Labor also directly reflect this structure. According to the '2021 Second Half Fair Recruitment Procedure Act Workplace Guidance and Inspection' results released by the Ministry of Employment and Labor in January 2022, 148 violations were uncovered across 459 inspected workplaces. However, the imposition of fines stood at 23 cases and corrective orders at only 6 cases, while 119 cases were handled as improvement guidance considering the intent of the law. Among these, 28 cases involved failure to notify recruitment schedules and 19 cases involved failure to notify recruitment results. In the first half guidance and inspection results released in July 2024, 45 cases of violating the obligation to notify rejection notices were uncovered, but similarly failed to lead to measures beyond recommendations. In a structure where even inspected workplaces end with recommendations, the vast majority of workplaces not included in the inspection targets have little incentive to abide by notification obligations.

Why Companies Do Not Notify

The reasons why companies are reluctant to issue rejection notices cannot be explained solely by a lack of sincerity. HR practitioners point to the administrative burden of individually notifying applicants when job postings attract hundreds of people as the primary factor. This is compounded by practices such as delaying result notifications to alternative applicants in case top candidates reject job offers, or keeping job postings open without notice even when recruitment itself is put on hold or canceled due to internal circumstances. The shift from public open recruitment-centric methods to rolling and continuous recruitment, which has increased instances where screening schedules are not specified in job postings, is also a factor making it difficult for job seekers to gauge results.

However, these circumstances can hardly serve as grounds for exempting notification obligations. Major recruitment platforms already provide functions to batch-send results to all applicants, reducing the cost of notification significantly compared to the past. Moreover, if a company wishes to keep alternative candidates in reserve, simply notifying them that they are being maintained as preliminary candidates allows job seekers to make their next decisions. Nevertheless, because notifying the suspension or halting of recruitment or the status of preliminary candidates is not an obligation expressly required by the current Fair Recruitment Procedure Act, the reality is that it is difficult to take issue with companies under current laws even if they fail to notify these matters. How to fill this gap remains a legislative supplementary task.

A Job Seeker's Time is a Cost: Economic Losses Created by the Absence of Notifications

The absence of result notifications goes beyond individual job seeker inconvenience, degrading the matching efficiency of the labor market as a whole. While job seekers hold onto applications with unknown results and delay other opportunities, their job search period can lengthen, potentially increasing income gaps and job preparation costs. In particular, for experienced job seekers whose career gaps easily lead to a decline in market value, the waiting period itself poses a burden. However, since prolonged job searching is the result of overlapping factors such as contracted recruitment demand and job mismatches, it is appropriate to understand the non-notification practice as one of the factors worsening the situation. From the company's perspective as well, the practice of not notifying results spreads quickly through job seeker communities and returns as reputational costs, which can result in quality candidates showing reluctance to apply in subsequent recruitments.

The fact that job preparation students in the aforementioned FKI survey cited 'difficulty in gathering employment information' (9.7%) and 'difficulty in planning due to the spread of rolling recruitment' (7.6%) as factors making job preparation difficult can be read in the same context. In an environment where recruitment schedules and results are not transparently disclosed, it is difficult for job seekers to rationally establish application strategies. Because this could ultimately lead to young people giving up on job hunting, securing the effectiveness of notification obligations needs to be treated as part of youth employment policy rather than a mere matter of etiquette.

Full Revisions Repeatedly Scrapped and Re-debated... Unconfirmed Even in 2026

Attempts to fully revise the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act into the 'Fair Recruitment Act' have occurred multiple times. The government has pushed for a total revision into the 'Act on Fair Recruitment,' which expands and strengthens employers' obligations. Although discussions continued during the 21st National Assembly with dozens of enactment and revision bills related to the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act being proposed, a full revision bill proposed in 2023 was scrapped upon the expiration of the assembly term. Entering the 22nd National Assembly, a partial revision bill containing provisions to impose fines of up to 1 million won on employers who fail to notify recruitment results was proposed in February 2025. However, according to recruitment industry data, the full revision remains unconfirmed as of July 2026.

While revisions are delayed, blind spots are expanding further. As a significant portion of job postings are published and closed through platforms, and the proportion of rolling recruitment by small enterprises and startups grows, the regulation excluding workplaces with fewer than 30 employees and the absence of obligations to notify results by screening stage leave more job seekers outside the protection of the law than when the act was enacted. With the government announcing plans to release youth employment measures in August around the time of the July employment trends release, this explains the growing calls for legal revisions that enhance the transparency of recruitment procedures to be included as a pillar of those measures.

What Needs to Be Fixed

Synthesizing the issues in the field, the direction for revision is relatively clear. First, minimum effectiveness mechanisms such as fines or corrective orders must be granted to the recruitment status notification obligation under Article 10 to transform the current structure which stops at recommendations. Second, a new obligation to notify results by screening stage—which is absent from current laws—must be established to require notifications for each stage such as document screening and interviews. Instead of vague expressions like 'without delay,' notification deadlines must be specified so job seekers can plan their next applications. Third, obligations to notify the suspension or halting of recruitment and the status of preliminary candidates, which are likewise not explicitly stipulated by current laws, must be newly mandated to prevent situations where non-responses are mistaken for ongoing processes. Fourth, the scope of application should be gradually expanded to workplaces with fewer than 30 employees, while considering the burden on small businesses by potentially reviewing methods that recognize the fulfillment of obligations through batch notifications via recruitment platforms. The above are analytical suggestions from KBR, and specific institutional designs are matters to be discussed during the legislative process.

In a recruitment market where applying to 100 places yields only three responses, the silence of the remaining 97 forces job seekers to endure a wait longer than rejection. Now, more than 12 years since the enactment of the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act, revisions to grant effectiveness to notification obligations and expand their scope have become tasks that can no longer be delayed.