A new Samsung recruiting method was finally shut downed last January, due to the objection of public opinion. Samsung is not just one company in Korea. Around 20% of total GDP is dependent on the performance of this Corporation. In other words, the decisions of Samsung executives affect Korean society more than we expect, especially in their recruiting methods. Originally, Samsung recruited most of candidates who satisfy a little documental qualification in the first stage before SSAT (SamSung Aptitude Test), which is the main hurdle to select the 10% who are going to be invited to the interview stage. Yet, the thing is that the number of candidates who enroll in the SSAT is around 200,000 a year, which is around half of the total graduates in Korea. Accordingly, the cost for SSAT preparation, such as the place to test, the people who check it and the actual test paper, has been a controversial issue this past last year. That is why Samsung has been trying to introduce the new Samsung recruiting method that reduces the number of candidates for SSAT up to one-fourth, with diverse ways before SSAT, like Mentor Recruiting, Document Recruiting, and Recommendation Recruiting.
    It had looked creative and clever for solving the excessive cost for SSAT, and recruiting diverse human resources. However, Recommendation Recruiting has had problematic factors that are the matter of how many tickets Samsung is going to allocate to the respective universities, who are desperate for the Samsung selection. As most people worried about, after allocation of Samsung for each university, the public opinion had started to be the underdog. A couple of matters happened in the new recruiting system, mainly the discrimination between the Eastern and Western areas of South Korea. For example, the number of candidates to be recommended for universities located in the eastern area such as Kyungpook National University and Pusan National University is two times more than the number of candidates for universities in the western area including Chonnam National University (CNU) and Chunbok National University. Samsung said “the number of students who major in engineering was an important factor to give criteria that is why some universities specialized in engineering like Kyungpook National University was advantageous to this new recruiting system”. Nevertheless, most public opinion, including the mayor of Gwangju Metropolitan City and the president of CNU commented against the new recruiting system.
    Eventually, Samsung had to shut down the new recruiting system within only two weeks after it was announced. Personally, although it makes sense that they focused on the candidates related with the engineering field, which composes the main industry of Samsung, Samsung should have considered a more balanced recommendation recruiting system in regions and gender for the future. Furthermore, the government should also keep asking corporations to hire in balance.
 

By Yun Soo-hong, Guest Reporter