From the Far Eastern Economic Review

AUTUMN IS JOB SEASON in South Korea, when fresh university graduates and young workers cross their fingers and send out their resumes, many hoping to land a job at one of the country's giant conglomerates or a multinational, as the companies fill out their ranks for the coming year. But winter's chill has come early to the job market this year.

Hammered by the global economic slowdown, half of South Korea's biggest companies aren't planning to hire this year, and many of the others have scaled back significantly. Yet the resumes keep coming. Companies are receiving so many applications for so few jobs that candidates have just a 1% chance of being hired.

Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Kia Motor were bombarded with 52,000 resumes for 300 jobs -- nearly twice the number for half as many jobs as last year. IBM Korea is sifting through 10,000 resumes for 100 openings and LG Telecom has 6,000 applicants for just 50 spots.

Lean times put employers in control of the job market, and the companies that are hiring have the pick of the litter. For entry-level jobs and junior positions, companies can choose from applicants with MBAs, doctorates and several years of work experience, making life extremely tough for recent graduates. "The entrance level is higher than before," says Eugene Lee, a consultant at Maverick, which recruits for multinational companies. "There are a lot of highly qualified people looking for jobs. Even if it's a small position, they all apply. It's quite surprising."

And there are simply more resumes being sent. Companies have seen a jump in the number of applicants in recent years, in large part because filling out an electronic resume is quicker and cheaper than going to all the trouble of posting a paper one.

"Because of the Internet, more people can apply to the company," says Jason Lee, a spokesman for the SK group. "They can apply to so many companies." This year more than 24,000 people applied -- electronically -- for 400 positions during the last week of September. "There were so many applicants trying to apply at our Internet site that it went down for a day," he says. "There were some complaints about that so we extended it for another day."

Electronic applications have made it easier for human-resources departments to sort resumes, picking out the skills, the degrees and experience they need. But recruiters and company officials say changing needs require more time to be spent on each applicant, focusing more on the subjective side of the person -- their attitude -- rather than the objective side -- their grades and degrees.

"You do have to see more people because you have to make sure you pick the right person, not necessarily the most qualified person," says Stephen Kitson, director of overseas public relations for Hyundai Motor. "Just being a good engineer or a good accountant isn't good enough any more. Now it's important that you don't look purely at simple academic qualifications."

"If you go back 10 years, when companies such as Hyundai and Kia were primarily focused on building their influence in the Korean domestic market, the question was: Can we get the right skills? What was important was not how do these applicants communicate with people outside the country, but can they help us develop the technology, the quality, the product we need now," Kitson says. "Increasingly, it is important that any new employee coming into the business has an international outlook."

The extra skills companies look for today make it harder for new graduates and workers with only a few years' experience to land their dream jobs. Maverick's Lee has this advice: Try thinking small. Find the job you really want at a smaller company, then use the experience to move up to a bigger firm. "A lot of Korean students go to a university or a company because of the name," she says. "People often make the mistake of wanting to work for a good-named company and then they work in a department they aren't interested in . . . We can't really get a good job for them because their career is not clear." When they find out what they want, she says, it's often too late to start again.

But until the job market picks up, most job seekers have little choice but to take what they can get, says Lee Min Hee, of Seoul's Incruit job agency. "Of course, they want to get a job," he says. "They don't have any choice."