Hyundai, Kia get rid of biannual recruitment

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Hyundai, Kia get rid of biannual recruitment

Hyundai Motor and its sister company Kia Motors will ditch their long-standing biannual recruitment drives and instead hire new talent year round, the companies said Wednesday.

Biannual recruitment drives are common among chaebol. Typically one massive recruitment session is held in the first half of the year and one in the second half.

Korea’s largest automaker by sales, however, said the custom doesn’t work anymore considering the rapid changes in the auto market.

“When we had two recruiting seasons fixed in our calendar we needed to project the number of employees we would need in the future,” a press officer from Hyundai Motor said. “That often created a mismatch between supply and demand of new recruits assigned to certain business departments.”

Usually when fall recruitment begins in September, the process is completed by December. New employees are then trained for about two months before they are allocated to different business divisions to begin work in March.

Under the new hiring schemes, Hyundai and Kia plan to let each business department decide the timing and size of their own recruitment. Each department will also come up with their own hiring process so they can pick people with the specific skill set in demand in that department.

Major human resources management decisions, such as organizational reshuffles will also be made within business departments after recruitment, so teams can more flexibly respond to shifting market demands, the auto company said.

Human resources departments will oversee and support the overall changes.

The automaker said the new approach will benefit job seekers because they will be able to focus on building the skill sets required for a certain role rather than preparing for a wide-ranging interview process. The company also said job seekers won’t have to wait six months or delay graduation for another semester after failing one of Hyundai’s recruitment programs, because hiring will take place year round.

From Wednesday, Hyundai Motor began hiring people to work in its finance administration department. At the end of last month, the automaker also opened up recruitment for engineers specializing in fuel-cell vehicles and commercial cars. Hyundai and Kia plan to gradually open up recruitment for other divisions later in the year.

Responding to questions on whether the on-demand system would end up reducing the number of new recruits, a Hyundai spokesperson said the size of recruitment largely “depends on the company’s business performance, not the hiring process.”


BY KIM JEE-HEE [kim.jeehee@joongang.co.kr]
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