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Companies are increasingly choosing experienced workers and junior-experienced hires (those with zero to three years of background) over pure new graduates.
According to the 2025 Hiring Market Survey by HR-tech firm Wanted Lab, 78.2% of HR managers said they planned to recruit primarily candidates with four or more years of experience, while only 21.8% said they planned to hire new graduates or junior-experienced workers.
Behind companies' preference for experienced hires lie two forces working in tandem: the social push for shorter working hours — the 52-hour workweek, the four-day workweek — and the economic reality of rising labor costs. According to the Ministry of Employment and Labor's establishment labor force survey, Korea's average monthly working hours fell from 163.9 hours in 2018, the year the 52-hour workweek was introduced, to 156.2 hours in 2023. Alongside this downward trend, discussions of a four-day workweek are now beginning to take root.
Labor costs, on the other hand, keep climbing. Korea's minimum wage has risen steadily since the minimum wage system was introduced in 1988, with jumps of 16.4% in 2018 and 10.9% in 2019. It is hard to argue that these wage increases were driven by corresponding gains in productivity.
In 2022, after the pandemic, labor productivity grew by just 0.4% while nominal wages rose 4.9%. Companies are facing wage growth that has decoupled from productivity. With environmental factors putting such strong pressure on productivity, firms have turned to experienced hires and AI to drive it — and in the process, new-graduate recruiting has inevitably fallen. It is hard to deny that this chain reaction will keep deepening the aversion to hiring new graduates.
The reason new hires are squeezed out of the productivity equation is the learning curve. Traditionally, new hires were expected to spend at least one to two years on training or non-productive work, and the time and cost needed to bring them up to a minimum level of capability was treated as an investment by the company. But in today's environment, where visible results are urgent, companies no longer have the room to wait years for that investment to pay off.
Experienced hires, by contrast, can be put straight into the work and start producing results. They already carry comparable work experience, so they can be deployed quickly and companies can expect a short-term payoff. Hiring someone with background in a specific field also lets the organization secure the expertise and capability it needs right away. Adaptation is easier too: experienced hires are more adept at navigating organizational dynamics and work environments, and they spend far less time on training and onboarding than new graduates do. According to JobKorea's 2024 survey on preferred criteria for experienced-hire recruiting, 86.7% of companies said experienced hires took "one to three months" to adapt to their work. In practice, experienced hires are settling into organizations and their roles in a very short span of time.
On top of experienced hires, AI agents are further squeezing new hires out of their place in the organization. AI agents are being used across a wide range of domains,
and are proving especially effective at automating simple, repetitive tasks. Document handling, data entry, report generation, and customer inquiry response — the kind of routine work that used to fall to junior staff — is now done faster and more accurately by AI.
None of this makes experienced hiring a cure-all. Companies still need to make new-graduate recruiting a part of the mix. The biggest reason is maintaining the organization's average age and energy level. Without a steady flow of new hires, the average age of the organization rises, which can dull its innovation and flexibility. The energy younger workers bring and the fresh ideas that break existing frames have a positive impact on a company's growth and ability to change.
Heritage, values, and culture also have to be passed on, and that too requires new-hire recruiting. To carry forward a company's core values and culture, hiring and developing new graduates is essential. Employees who join as new hires and grow within a single organization can become the people who most deeply internalize its values and culture.
Finally, the difference in long-term performance should not be overlooked. There are many cases in which long-tenured employees who joined as new hires and grew within the company make outsized contributions. In organizations with a "One Company Man" culture, these long-tenured employees rise to become key decision-makers and help secure the organization's stability and continuity. A leading Korean example is Yuhan Corporation. As of 2024, Yuhan's average employee tenure of 12.7 years is the longest in the pharmaceutical industry.
According to employee interviews, watching so many long-tenured colleagues steadily promoted gives Yuhan employees the sense that anyone can become CEO, motivating them to drive their own careers forward. That shared sense of possibility, along with broad employee loyalty, lets the company operate stably without labor-management conflict.
The short-term advantages of experienced hiring are clear, but for the company to endure, new-hire recruiting cannot be overlooked. Looking further ahead, companies must now think carefully about what shape their evaluation and reward systems should take for new hires. If there is a real case for hiring new graduates, then a company's ability to turn them into productive contributors — and then into genuine strengths — in a rapidly changing environment will define its own capability. If we were to summarize the way today's generation works in one phrase, it would be the blending of work and life — and, going further, the fusion of the two into a single thing.
The older-generation principle — handed down from their parents' generation — of "play when you play and work when you work," rigidly enforced, is no longer an attractive workplace for the new generation. This certainly does not mean falling back on the old reading that employees should sacrifice their personal time and devote it to the company.
Ultimately, the new generation's engagement peaks when every aspect of how work is done is grounded in genuine care, points toward opportunities for personal growth, and runs on clear, participatory communication. With that in mind, what should the most-preferred evaluation and reward systems for this generation look like?
A common prescription for helping new hires adapt more quickly is to strengthen structured mentoring programs and onboarding. Advocates of this approach call for selecting mentors who can serve as role models within the company and providing them with real incentives so that mentoring does not remain a formality.
But under most traditional performance management systems, this kind of development and mentoring is hard to recognize at the organizational level. To change that, many companies are adopting OKR-led continuous performance management and non-standardized evaluation systems. The wall most of them run into, though, is the question: "How do we quantitatively recognize and reward 'development,' which can only be measured through qualitative, non-standardized performance?"
The key, in the end, is to decouple evaluation and reward enough that they do not become tightly bound beyond a certain point. Within that decoupled structure, both tangible and intangible outcomes can be recognized broadly, and contributions like developing people, building positive relationships, and shaping organizational culture can be acknowledged as well. Financial rewards are not the only form of recognition a company can give. In fact, feedback rooted in "genuine interest and recognition" should be delivered much more immediately.
It is time to move away from traditional training methods and introduce systems built for fast learning. According to Deloitte research, employees spend less than 1% of their working hours on HRD and tend not to prefer content longer than four minutes. In response, companies are delivering short, effective learning content, developing simulations and participatory training programs that can be applied to the work immediately, and systematically documenting and building manuals around their work processes.
Still, it is worth asking why the new generation is moving away from traditional training in the first place. For them, learning is less about receiving knowledge from experienced seniors inside the company and more about spending time on the practical, pointed know-how of peers doing the same job outside the company, on the new productivity tools those peers are adopting, and on wide-ranging networking aimed at preparing for the expanded jobs and roles ahead. The better approach, then, is not to force them into a traditional training structure but to offer opportunities for more networking and broader absorption of external know-how. Giving them room for Self Study — the freedom to plan and execute their own outward-facing social networking — creates a virtuous cycle in which relevance to the job and job satisfaction both rise, and becomes part of the "non-monetary rewards" this generation prefers.
As we move toward younger generations, the relationship between the company and the individual is shifting — out of the old one-sided, hierarchical model and into an Employee Deal–centered relationship in which fair compensation and professional self-realization are pursued in exchange for the labor provided. For this generation, work should not be handed down on the basis of loyalty and diligence; instead, clear job requirements and expectations, together with rewards grounded in job value and performance, are what is needed. Any organization that has not internalized this culture will simply be seen as "Old School" by the new generation.
Setting clear, job-based performance indicators from the very beginning — combined with immediate feedback on company-wide contributions and ongoing goal adjustments — can maximize an employee's sense of fairness, drive to grow, and satisfaction with the job itself. For a company's long-term growth and sustainable development, the talent pipeline cannot consist only of experienced hires; new-graduate recruiting is also necessary. And for that new-graduate recruiting to translate into the results a company is counting on, the operational strategy after hiring has to be thought through with equal care.
In particular, the arrival of AI agents can be viewed as an opportunity rather than a crisis. The resources that used to be tied up in simple, repetitive work — resources that could not be spent on new-hire development — can now be redirected into onboarding programs, practical training, and internal networking activities for new hires. Securing the expertise of experienced hires matters, but the role of new hires matters just as much. Going forward, only companies that develop the best "new-hire academy" models and shorten the learning curve will be able to endure. That calls for a performance management system focused more on contribution to how the work gets done, rather than being buried in periodic, quantified outputs,
and it calls for a diversified reward system — one that goes beyond money to include non-monetary rewards like external learning opportunities — along with job-based performance indicators.