[MI Focus] Baek Seung-ah, HCG Vice President: Completing Trust Through HR Technology in the AI Era — A Standard Built Over 25 Years in the Field

"For 25 years, what we've done is solve the complex problems of HR with technology. Our AI research is an extension of that work."

 

Baek Seung-ah, Vice President of Human Consulting Group (HCG), answered this way when asked about the company's identity. She emphasized, "HCG has always been the innovator experimenting first with new approaches in the market."

 

HCG is a full-lifecycle HR Tech company that diagnoses the entire spectrum of corporate HR and organizational operations, designs HR programs, delivers them through technology, and takes ownership of ongoing operations. Unlike general HR firms that offer only consulting, only implementation, or only SaaS, HCG was the first in Korea to establish a "vertical model" that connects every stage as a single flow.

 

◇ HCG Looked at "Structure," Not Company Size — The Birth of Vertical HR Tech

 

When HCG was founded in 2001, Korea's HR market was dominated by the simple replication of overseas models. Adopting global frameworks as-is, or only slightly modifying a few features, was the norm. But these models did not fit Korean companies with their distinct policies, organizational culture, and labor environments. HCG was the first company to surface this problem.

 

Vice President Baek explained, "At the time, overseas examples were treated as the correct answer, but I believed the structure had to be redesigned for Korean realities to make it actually work. We started HR consulting grounded in Korean regulations, then introduced hunel—a domain-specific HR solution for large enterprises and public institutions—redefining the market."

 

HCG's scope then expanded into the mid-market and strong SMB segment. HCG recognized that a smaller company size does not mean HR is any less complex. "There are 300-person companies that operate manufacturing, retail, R&D, and services all at once—each with entirely different talent profiles," she said. "Company size doesn't determine HR difficulty; what determines it is the talent structure and the pace of policy change."

 

That context gave rise to JaDE for SMBs, which was later joined by cloud-based talenx—designed for faster, more flexible adoption.

 

What gives HCG its unique market position is its vertical HR Tech model that seamlessly connects consulting, implementation, and operations—structurally eliminating the common gap that forms when HR consulting firms and HR technology firms are separate organizations.

 

"When the team designing HR policy and the team building the technology are different, we've seen plenty of cases where great policy falls apart because the system can't keep up," she said. "HCG could narrow that gap because we are an organization that understands both sides at the same time."......(hereafter omitted.)