Monday, November 11, 2013

Choe Kyung-Yo/Interview 1st Draft/Tue 3,4

Difficulties of Landing a Job

 

According to the OECD, Korea has the largest percentage of university students among OECD members. On average, 84% of high school students attend college in Korea, which overwhelms all other countries.

 

This means more and more people who graduated from colleges are finding high-quality jobs. Due to technological advances, however, manpower is getting unnecessary. Many jobs that used to require a great number of workers are now rapidly being replaced by machines.

 

Now, it is very common to read many articles on the Internet that say "Many companies have decided to reduce employment scale". Even some companies often announce that they are not recruiting anyone this year.

 

As a common university student who must be going to face up to this harsh realities in a few years, this current situations worry me a lot. That's why it looks very understandable that I am deeply interested in employment and chose it as a topic for my interview.

 

Fortunately, I have one person who is exactly fit for doing this interview. She is my roommate, which sounds like I am living in dormitory. I live in 'a sort of dormitory', not a real one. Simply explaining it, Jeonllabukdo-Seoul-Janghaksuk where I have been living since last year was built in 1993 for students whose hometown are not Seoul but came up to for their universities.

 

Anyway, my roommate, H.J Jeong, is at Yon-sei university and majoring in politics and international studies. I was so sure that she was going to be a perfect interviewee because she has been trying to get a job for since four months ago.

 

It was difficult, however, to ask her this interview about her employment, because she didn't get a job yet. It looked very strange to me, because she is attending one of the most reputational universities (so called, 'SKY' in Korea), also having a very good GPA, a high TOEIC score and other different certificates. But she didn't anyway.

 

I asked her this interview on the pretext of doing very important assignment, and fortunately she accepted it.

 

She gave me a lot of practical, valuable information and even advice about the hiring process through this interview.

 

At first, according to her, basic hiring process generally consists of the following three steps-the document screening, personality & aptitude tests and interviewing.

 

Of the whole steps, she particularly found the second step difficult, because most applicants-including her-start preparing personality and aptitude tests after passing the document screening process. But the problem is that the given time is very short between announcing the result of the document step and the date of the second process.

 

When I asked her "What do you think is your weakness in the job market?" She responded without any hesitation. "My sex and major" She said, "I believe most companies prefer who majored in management or at least economics to who didn't. If I could go back to two years ago, I would double-major in business administration." She sincerely told me not to give up B.A no matter how difficult it is.

 

And she added her sex is another barrier that hinders her from being hired. I requested her to elaborate on that. She said, hiring women costs companies much more money, because women need more welfare such as maternity leave, menstrual leave, which make companies unwilling to women applicants. When she told about this, it looked like her face was saying "It is unfair! I can't select my sex"

 

She pointed out that one of the biggest factors that make it harder to find a job is the gap between the large and mid-sized companies. In all aspects, such as the salary, welfare, large companies are too much superior to the mid-sized ones. It causes more and more applicants to pay attention to only them.

 

She mentioned not knowing the exact date for the announcement of the passed is one painful part. She described it a "torture". She said "Waiting vacantly is just like a torture. All I can do is just enter the website and check over and over again."

 

At the end of the interview, she added her expectation about job market. "For 10 years from now, it will be getting harder to find a job, in about 20 or 30 years, however, relatively easier because of shrinking population"

 

 

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