Criticism Grows That Recruitment Practices Failing to Even Notify Document Results Fuel Prolonged Job Seeking... The Blind Spot of Businesses 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 Even Knowing Document Results

Ms. Choi, a 29-year-old woman who actively began job hunting this year, submitted application forms to about 100 companies from January to this month, but only received word from three that she passed the document screening. She stated that most of the other companies closed their recruitment notices quietly or let the application deadlines pass without informing applicants of the document screening results. Choi mentioned that while senior job seekers told her that no news of acceptance meant rejection, the phrase 'individual contact to successful document applicants' written in the job postings left her unable to determine whether the screening process was over or still ongoing, causing her to stare at the same posting for over a month and delay other applications.

The situation is largely similar for Mr. Park, a 39-year-old man living in Incheon. 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 took part in interviews at five of them, but said only two companies informed him of his acceptance status after the interviews. The remaining three companies promised to notify him of the results within the week during the interviews, but no calls or texts ever came, and it was only after Park directly contacted the HR manager to check that he was told another person had already been hired. Park expressed frustration that with his unemployment benefits period coming to an end, each recruitment case with unknown results acted as a stumbling block in establishing his next application plan.

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

Youth Employment Falls for 45 Consecutive Months, Document Pass Rate Drops Below 20%

Behind the 'responsive-free recruitment' felt by job seekers lies a narrowed employment gateway. According to the 'July 2026 Employment Trends' released by the National Statistics Agency on the 12th, employed persons aged 15 and older in July stood at 29.136 million, up 108,000 from a year earlier. However, employed youth aged 15 to 29 decreased by 191,000 to 3.441 million, 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 consecutive months. The youth unemployment rate rose 1.3 percentage points to 6.8%, marking the largest increase since January 2021—5 years and 6 months ago—while the number of unemployed youth increased by 41,000 to 251,000. The National Statistics Agency explained that this partly reflected the concentration of job-seeking activities such as civil service exams during the survey week, but it remains clear that recruitment demand has failed 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 enrolled students and graduates of four-year universities nationwide), job seekers actively engaged in job hunting submitted job applications an average of 13.4 times per year, but passed document screenings an average of only 2.6 times. This brought the document pass rate down to 19.4%, a 2.8 percentage point drop from the previous year (22.2%), while 62.6% of respondents expected employment preparation to take six months or longer. In the same survey, 6 out of 10 job seekers (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 actively seeking work.

The figure of an average of 13 to 14 applications is limited to students and graduates of four-year universities, making it distant from the field reality where job seekers like Choi apply to nearly 100 places. However, given that as the number of applications increases, the number of application cases with unknown results also rises, the decline in document pass rates and the non-notification practice can be seen as factors simultaneously escalating the burden on job seekers.

Surveys dealing directly with rejection notices themselves largely consist of relatively old data. In a survey released by JobKorea in October 2019 (targeting 1,862 job seekers with application experience), 51.5% of respondents stated they received no notification from companies where they were rejected after final interviews. The proportion of receiving rejection notices by company type—based on JobKorea's announcement—stood at the 70% range for large conglomerates, 50% for public enterprises, 40% for foreign-affiliated companies, and 30% for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), showing that smaller company sizes correlated with lower rates of notification. In a survey conducted by JobKorea the same year targeting 364 HR managers, 61% replied that they do not provide separate notifications to rejected applicants. While the situation may have improved somewhat with the spread of batch-notification functions on recruitment platforms, no major recent official surveys confirm whether the past figure—stating that half of job seekers who underwent final interviews heard no results—has significantly changed.

Article 10 of the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act: Obligations Exist, But No Sanctions

Rejection notifications are not a matter left to the goodwill of companies, but an obligation already stipulated by law. Article 10 of the 'Act on Fairization of Recruitment Procedures' (Fair Recruitment Procedure Act), enacted and implemented in January 2014, stipulates that when a recruiter determines the hiring targets, they must notify job seekers of their employment status without delay. The Ministry of Employment and Labor's operational manual and practical guidelines from recruitment platforms also explain that the practice of notifying only successful applicants while leaving rejected applicants uninformed 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 positions.

The problem is that Article 10 itself lacks direct grounds for fines or corrective orders for violating this obligation, meaning Ministry of Employment and Labor inspections have been handled primarily around improvement recommendations. While the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act prescribes criminal punishment for false job 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 stipulates no corresponding direct sanction provisions for failing to notify recruitment results. Furthermore, current law only regulates result notifications after the final recruitment targets are finalized, and does not explicitly state deadlines for result notifications at each screening stage—such as document screening and interviews. Consequently, 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 the state, local governments (excluding public official recruitment), and public institutions, while workplaces with fewer than 30 regular workers are entirely excluded from its application. Recalling that SMEs had the lowest proportion of receiving rejection notices in the aforementioned JobKorea survey, the area with the poorest notifications lies essentially outside the law.

The inspection results of the Ministry of Employment and Labor also demonstrate this structure. According to the results of the '2nd Half 2021 Fair Recruitment Procedure Act Workplace Guidance and Inspection' 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 only 23 cases and corrective orders at 6 cases, while 119 cases were handled as improvement guidance considering the legislative intent. Among these, 28 cases involved failure to notify recruitment schedules and 19 cases involved failure to notify hiring results. In the first-half guidance and inspection results announced in July 2024, 45 cases of violating the rejection notification obligation were uncovered, yet they failed to lead to measures beyond recommendations for the same reasons. In a structure where even inspected workplaces end with recommendations, the vast majority of businesses not included in the inspection targets have little incentive to abide by the notification obligation.

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 cite the administrative burden of individually notifying applicants in job postings involving hundreds of people as the primary factor. This is compounded by the practice of delaying result notifications to runner-up applicants in case the final candidate rejects the job offer, and the practice of posting jobs and closing them without notice even when recruitment itself is put on hold or canceled due to internal circumstances. The shift from open recruitment-centric methods to rolling and continuous recruitment—which increasingly leaves recruitment schedules unspecified in job postings—is also a factor making it difficult for job seekers to gauge results.

However, such circumstances can hardly serve as grounds for exempting the notification obligation. Major recruitment platforms already provide functions to batch-send results to all applicants, significantly lowering notification costs compared to the past. Moreover, if a company wishes to keep runner-up candidates in reserve, simply notifying them that they are being maintained as reserve candidates allows job seekers to make their next decisions. Nevertheless, because notifying the suspension or halting of recruitment or notifying reserve candidate statuses are not obligations expressly required by the current Fair Recruitment Procedure Act, companies face no legal issues under current law even if they fail to disclose them, leaving the question of how to fill this gap as an unfinished legislative improvement task.

Job Seekers' Time is Money: Economic Losses Created by the Absence of Notifications

The absence of result notifications transcends individual job seeker inconveniences, reducing the matching efficiency of the entire labor market. While job seekers hold onto application cases with unknown results and postpone other opportunities, their job-seeking periods can lengthen, potentially increasing income gaps and job preparation costs. In particular, for experienced job seekers whose career gaps easily translate into a drop in market value, the waiting period itself poses a heavy burden. That said, because prolonged job hunting is the result of overlapping factors such as contracted recruitment demand and job mismatches, the non-notification practice is best understood as one of the factors exacerbating the situation. From the corporate perspective, the practice of not notifying results spreads quickly through job-seeker communities, turning into reputational costs that ultimately discourage top-tier applicants from applying in future recruitments.

This context is echoed in the aforementioned Federation of Korean Industries survey, where job seekers 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. In an environment where recruitment schedules and results are not transparently disclosed, job seekers struggle to establish rational application strategies. Because this can eventually lead to youth giving up on job hunting altogether, securing the effectiveness of notification obligations needs to be treated as part of youth employment policies rather than a mere matter of etiquette.

Comprehensive Revisions Loop Through Scraping and Re-discussion... Unconfirmed Even in 2026

Attempts to comprehensively revise the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act into the 'Fair Recruitment Act' have occurred multiple times. The government has pursued a total revision into the 'Act on Fair Recruitment'—which expands and strengthens the obligations of recruiters—and discussions continued in the 21st National Assembly with dozens of bills proposed regarding the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act. However, the comprehensive revision bill proposed in 2023 was scrapped due to the expiration of the assembly term. In the 22nd National Assembly, a partial revision bill was proposed in February 2025 containing provisions to newly impose a fine of up to 1 million won on recruiters who fail to notify hiring results. However, according to data from the recruitment industry, as of July 2026, the comprehensive revision remains unconfirmed.

While revisions are delayed, blind spots are expanding further. As a significant portion of job postings are posted and closed via platforms, and small businesses and startups increase their share of rolling recruitment, the exclusion regulation for workplaces with fewer than 30 employees and the absence of stage-by-stage notification obligations leave more job seekers outside the protection of the law than when the legislation was first enacted. With the government announcing plans to release youth employment measures in August around the time of the July employment trends announcement, calls are growing for law 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 Article 10's obligation to notify hiring results, changing the current structure which stops at recommendations. Second, obligations to notify results by screening stage—which are absent in current law—must be newly established to mandate reporting results for each stage such as document screening and interviews, replacing vague expressions like 'without delay' with explicit notification deadlines so job seekers can plan their subsequent application schedules. Third, obligations to notify the suspension or pausing of recruitment and the status of reserve candidates—which are also not explicitly regulated by current law—must be newly mandated to prevent situations where a lack of response is mistaken for an ongoing process. Fourth, the scope of application should be gradually expanded to workplaces with fewer than 30 employees, while considering the burdens on small businesses, ways to recognize the fulfillment of obligations through batch notifications via recruitment platforms can be reviewed concurrently. The above represents KBR's analytical suggestions, and specific institutional designs are matters to be discussed during the legislative process.

In a job market where applying to 100 places yields only three replies, the silence of the remaining 97 forces job seekers to endure waits far longer than rejections. As the Fair Recruitment Procedure Act passes 12 years since its enactment, revising the law to impart effectiveness onto notification obligations and broaden its scope has become an indispensable task that can no longer be delayed.