Before posting the role again, look at the mismatch

Korean employers sought 1.464 million workers in Q1 2026 and hired 1.368 million. About 96,000 positions remained unfilled, for a 6.5% unfilled rate.

The largest reported reason was the absence of applicants with the experience employers required, at 25.8%. Missing education or qualifications followed at 18.5%.

The bottleneck is not only applicant volume

A separate survey of companies using Work24 found that 43.9% named searching for talent information as their biggest difficulty in hiring. The problem can begin before selection: employers may not know where the relevant people are.

For experienced hires, adjacent industries and different job titles can hide people who have performed similar work. More traffic to the same narrowly defined posting does not necessarily create a broader candidate pool.

Employers are already diversifying how they recruit

The labor survey found that 68.4% of employers addressing labor shortages increased recruiting spending or diversified recruiting methods. Improving pay and working conditions was cited by 28.6%.

Diversifying channels and diversifying the search are not identical. If every channel uses the same rigid experience definition, the underlying pool may barely change.

Three questions for a role that stays open

Is the requirement really a job title, or a capability needed to produce the outcome? Is same-industry experience essential, or can adjacent experience transfer? And is waiting for applicants enough, or does the role require direct talent discovery?

This is not an argument for lowering standards. It is an argument for defining the non-negotiable evidence more precisely and widening the search around everything else.

What the data does not prove

The 96,000 unfilled positions did not share one cause. Industry, location, pay, hours and employer size all matter. Public statistics cannot reveal a specific company’s true hiring requirement.

But for repeatedly open roles, the question can move from “Why are there no applicants?” to “Are we defining the experience too narrowly, or searching in the wrong places?”

BANSEOG VIEW

When hiring stalls, the first variable to revisit may be the experience definition and the search boundary

Banseog HR Intelligence tracks hiring friction through role requirements, adjacent experience and talent-discovery signals—not only vacancy counts.

Future Hiring Signals will examine why the same job title can imply different experience requirements across industries.

SOURCES

Primary sources and references

Based on public data from Korea’s Ministry of Employment and Labor. Aggregate vacancy statistics do not explain any single employer’s hiring requirement. No private Banseog client, candidate or Search evidence is used.