[WHY] Koreans can't brag about SKY during job interviews

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Published: 22 Apr. 2023, 07:00 Updated: 24 May. 2023, 16:05

[WHY] Koreans can't brag about SKY during job interviews

An illustration by Kang Il-gu [KANG IL-GU]

The idea of blind hiring, or blind recruitment, is a concept not unique to Korea, which in recent years began mandating its civil service and the public sector to apply the practice regularly.

Also embraced by major overseas companies such as HSBC and Google, it essentially attempts to blindfold the recruiters by withholding personal information about the candidates that could influence employment decisions, such as their gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic background.

But the practice almost always goes a step further in Korea to ensure one crucial information is omitted from the candidate’s file: the name of the college they attended.

“The idea is to give each applicant an equal footing, rather than picking someone based on whether they went to a top school,” said one recruiter at an insurance company in Seoul that regularly applies the method in its hiring process.

It may seem odd to withhold information related to the applicant’s academic achievements, which can speak for his or her potential as a professional, but some sociologists say otherwise, pointing to Korea’s meritocracy built on, and in some ways fed by, social inequalities.

“It is difficult to say that the acquisition of academic credentials [in Korea] are the result of fair educational competition,” said Lee Geon-man, a sociologist and author, in his study on class conflict and education in Korea.

Several political scandals, which have even ousted a sitting president and a justice minister in recent years, have anecdotally proven such outlooks to be true.

What’s in a school name?

Anyone who watched the Korean drama “Sky Castle” knows how cutthroat the competition to get into the country's top universities can be.

A street in a hagwon-packed neighborhood of Daechi-dong of Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on March 7. Korea's spending on private education peaked at 26 trillion won last year. [YONHAP]

In Korea, only the nation’s top 2 percent of its brightest minds attend what it calls the SKY universities, an acronym derived from the first letters of Korea's top three universities: Seoul University, Korea University and Yonsei University.

Preparations to be part of this cohort start young for many Koreans, who attend at least two private cram schools in addition to their normal schooling from as young as the age of 8, according to a survey by the Consumer Network for Public Interest in 2020.

But not everyone is able to afford this kind of intense private academic training, especially from a young age, and statistics have shown for years the tie between wealth and education in Korea.

Of all the districts throughout the country, the top wealthiest in southern Seoul — Gangnam, Seocho and Songpa — are the top districts in terms of the number of residents admitted to Seoul National University every year, according to a study by Ma Gang-rae, an urban planning and economy professor at Chung-Ang University.

Such SKY graduates would then make up as much as 53 percent of the National Assembly's lawmaker positions; 71 percent of the minister-level posts; 49 percent of the heads of local governments; 53 percent of CEO positions; 65 percent of legal professions; and 63 percent of hospital directorship, according to Ma’s study in 2016.

The current government is no different: 79 percent of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s first cabinet put together last year were SKY graduates.

Seoul National University's Law School [SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY]

SKY and nepotism

When sociologists like Lee argue that “those with high academic achievements would form cliques and maintain their dominance through nepotism,” it wasn’t like he had discovered something that the rest of the Koreans didn’t already know.

The use and reliance of one’s networks to get ahead in society is to an extent an accepted practice in Korea, so much so that there is a phrase that people collectively refer to when it comes to their networks of family relations, acquaintances and school: hyeolyeon, jiyeon and hagyeon.

In fact, it used to be common for recruiters to ask applicants what their parents' occupations are. Depending on the applicant’s answer, the recruiter would be able to gauge whether he or she came from a so-called “connected” family.

The societal threshold for such values, however, appeared to have reached its limit in recent years when two political scandals engulfed the nation’s leaders.

At the center of several cases of power abuse by former President Park Geun-hye that came to light in 2016 and eventually led to her impeachment in 2017 was her friend Choi Soon-sil, whose influence-peddling targets involved not only the state but also several conglomerates including Samsung, Hyundai Motor and KT.

She had also pulled strings in academic circles to ensure her daughter Chung Yoo-ra gained admission into Ewha Womans University, another of the top universities in the country, despite not meeting some of its minimum requirements.

This revelation was met with an overwhelming response from the students, who held nightly vigils on campus for weeks until the university’s president resigned. Chung's admission was revoked.

Thousands of students of Ewha Womans University stage a vigil on Aug. 10, 2016, to call for resignation of the university's president, Choi Kyung-hee, after the revelation that she colluded with Choi Soon-sil, close friend of then-President Park Geun-hye, to admit Choi's daughter to the university years ago despite the fact that she didn't meet the minimum requirements. [CHOI JEONG-DONG]

The turnout of events was similar to another scandal that followed in 2019, when Cho Min, daughter of then-Justice Minister Cho Kuk, was found to have submitted falsified academic credentials with the help of her parents to Korea University and Pusan National University’s medical school. Cho Kuk resigned from his post two months after taking office, and his daughter was eventually revoked of her admissions.

Within just a year of Chung’s scandal, all public organizations and the civil service were mandated to apply blind recruiting.

Within two years of Cho’s scandal, all universities were mandated to do the same.

Students of Korea University stage a protest on campus on Aug. 23, 2019, to demand investigations into then-Justice Minister Cho Kuk's daughter Cho Min's admissions process into the university, after allegations were raised that she received biased, favorable treatment during her admissions. [NEWS1]

Has there been visible change?

There is some statistical evidence to suggest that the use of blind hiring has had an equalizing effect.

Since around 350 public organizations in Korea were mandated to apply the process from 2017, a study by the Ministry of Employment and Labor found that the proportion of SKY graduates in the new recruits across these public organizations dropped by around 30 percent, in comparing the new recruits in 2015 and 2016 to those in 2017 and 2018.

There has also been evidence that more women were hired across public institutions as a result of the policy: the rate of new female hires rose from 34 percent in 2016 to 39 percent in 2019, according to a study by the ministry released in 2021.

The process didn’t work so well, however, for research-heavy organizations such as think tanks, which reported difficulties in hiring new researchers without checking their academic credentials. The government waived the regulation for public research institutes in January 2023.

The policy also hasn’t flown well with many in the private sector.

Participants at a job fair in Suwon, Gyeonggi, on April 29, fill out applications at a desk.[NEWS1]

Among some 400 tech companies surveyed by Incruit, a job portal website, in July last year, only three out of 10 were found to have applied varying degrees of the blind-recruitment process.

Of the companies that weren’t utilizing any of the blind-recruitment system, the largest proportion, or 38.45 percent, said that they found it “insufficient to properly judge expertise and competitiveness” of the applicants.

“What the recruiters are looking for is the whole picture,” said an HR specialist with a decade of experience in hiring across companies in Seoul. “For instance, the Toeic [a standardized English-language test in Korea] score on its own is not as important as the fact that the applicant put in the efforts to take the test. We’re not looking for a black-and-white picture or a perfect match. We’re trying to see the whole picture of the person behind the resumé to see if they would be a good fit.”

Can blind recruitment improve social mobility?

Covering up the school’s name in the resumé of the job seeker can hardly be a one-stop solution to address the deeper societal divide and inequalities in Korea.

Korea’s income inequality is considered moderate when put on a global scale, and actually hasn’t changed much from its war-ravaged years until today.

Korea’s Gini coefficient for income inequality, which measures the gap between the rich and the poor, stood at 0.332 in 1970 according to Korea Development Institute. It improved slightly in the 1980s but landed back at 0.331 in 2020 according to the OECD, likely due to the aftermath of the financial crises in the '90s and early 2000s, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

But what is changing more drastically is the ability for people to climb the socioeconomic ladder.

The Korea Development Institute announced earlier this year that the population’s income mobility has consistently dropped from 2011 to 2021.

A scene in movie "Parasite" shows actor Song Kang-ho standing in a half-underground apartment, or a banjiha. [CJ ENM]

“The absolute decrease of income mobility could be interpreted to mean that it has become increasingly more difficult for people to climb the social ranks,” said Lee Young-wook, head of the institute's social policy research department, in meeting with the press on Jan. 31.

This increasingly difficult hurdle in social mobility over the years has not gone unnoticed by the younger generation, who coined terms such as “dirt spoon” and “gold spoon” to lament the divide.

Those raised in a wealthy family, which proves influential in helping them attain entrance at top universities and secure jobs, are considered to have been born with gold spoons in their mouths. Contrarily, the dirt spoon is synonymous with Koreans born into poor families who had to earn their place in society rather than simply inherit it.

Still, some individuals like Ms. Kim, a metalsmith artist in her 40s in Goyang, Gyeonggi, say blind recruitment practices are a step in the right direction given Korea’s hype with school names and academic records that even permeates artists’ societies.

“Returning to Korea after years of studies in the United States, I was faced with this reality in Korea that without hakyeon and jiyeon, I’d have a hard time trying to join exhibitions to showcase my work, because cliques would already have formed based on these connections,” Kim said.

Deciding to host a group exhibition herself, Kim called for applications from other artists. She applied the blind recruitment principles and asked the artists to submit their works, without any information about where they attended school.

She said she knew it was the right decision when she heard their feedback.

“Some said they were never able to join an exhibition in Seoul because they didn’t have the right school connections,” Kim said. “I don’t think the blind recruitment process needs to be mandated for all. But where it is applied, it can give some people a chance to shine for the first time."

BY ESTHER CHUNG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]

korea joongAng daily

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[WHY] Koreans can't brag about SKY during job interviews

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