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[WHY] Nothing is fair in specs and war: how Korean youth are suffering in the job market

Published: 27 Sep. 2025, 07:00

LIM JEONG-WON
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

A job seeker reads documents in preparation for an on-site interview at a job fair at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul on Aug. 20. [YONHAP]

Just last week, seven of Korea’s biggest conglomerates announced that they plan on hiring around 40,000 new workers this year. College students and prospective job seekers should be celebrating. But are they?

It is notoriously difficult to get a job as a young college grad these days. One thing that stands out in the Korean job market, however, is the “spec war": students and job seekers building up "specs" — short for "specifications" — or qualifications in the form of language tests, internships, licenses and other means to fill out their resumes.

A case of the spec war getting completely out of hand shook the country back in 2019 when then-Justice Minister Cho Kuk’s daughter was found to have falsified documents related to her medical school applications and been granted special treatment in the process of getting internships and letters of recommendation.

Cho’s daughter was ultimately pulled from medical school, and her university degrees and entrance to medical school were revoked. When searched in Korean online, Cho’s daughter’s case is almost always tied to the word "specs," with the whole fiasco dubbed as a “false specs controversy.”

So what is the whole deal with specs and the spec war? Where did it start, how much time and money do people spend on building specs and is that at all productive in the end?

Former Justice Minister and founder of the Rebuilding Korea Party Cho Kuk walks out of Seoul Central District Court in Seocho District, southern Seoul after a hearing on Feb. 3, 2023. [YONHAP]

"It feels like a war": the realities of specs

Is the competition to build up your resume so harsh as to call it a “war”? The answer, according to young job seekers, is a definite “yes.”

“I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it feels like a war,” said Choi Jin-young, a 25-year-old student who has deferred graduation for a semester to concentrate on building up specs to apply to big conglomerates. “To get even an internship is so competitive, knowing that an internship is not an end but a means.”

“I spend I guess about a third of my time building my specs,” said another university student surnamed Lee. “That includes studying for language tests like TOEIC and second language-related qualifications, writing personal statements to get an internship and everything. It does take up a lot of my time.”

The amount of money spent on building specs is also striking, with job seekers spending on average 440,000 won ($314) monthly on efforts to get more specs, according to surveys done in 2024 by Statistics Korea and Job Korea.

Students wait in line for consultations at a law school admissions fair at aT Center in Seocho District, southern Seoul on Aug. 21. [YONHAP]

Nearly half, or 42.9 percent, of all university graduates looking for a job signed up for or are receiving private tutoring, or they are going to hagwons for specs, according to a September survey by Job Korea. Of those surveyed, 71.1 percent said that they feel financially burdened by the process of building specs to secure a job.

Some students even get part-time jobs so that they can pay for their spec-building activities — a strange cycle of “lesser” jobs paying the way for “better” jobs.

Some young people are so tired from the spec war that they opt out of it completely, ending up as “NEETs” — which stands for not in education, employment or training — or economically inactive youth. The number of young NEETs peaked at 443,000 last year, the highest on record, according to Statistics Korea.

A student passes by job notices on a bulletin board at a university campus in Seoul on Sept. 10. [YONHAP]

When and why the spec war started

The start of the spec war can be traced back to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, when Korea faced a severe national financial crisis and received a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), according to experts.

“The problem of spec competition has been built up for a long time since the Asian Financial Crisis, when the stability of jobs and the number of jobs declined,” said Ahn Tae-hyun, a professor of economics at Sogang University.

"The Asian Financial Crisis was a turning point," explained Shin Eun-jong, a professor of business administration at Dankook University. "Korea’s old public recruitment model gave way to ad-hoc hiring focused on ready-made talent. Specs became the shorthand symbol companies used to identify who looked immediately useful. Even if the link between certificates or language scores and actual job performance was never clearly proven, the perception stuck."

Another key reason for the spec war in Korea is the sheer number of people who go to university for higher degrees.

A job seeker waits for an interview at a job fair held at the Software Convergenece Tech Biz Center in Daegu on Sept. 23. [YONHAP]

“Korea is a country with a very high percentage of people who pursue college degrees,” said Kim Yoo-bin, a research fellow of the Employment Policy Research Division at the Korea Labor Institute. “More than 70 percent of young Koreans have a college degree, so academic credentials alone make it difficult to establish any unique differentiation. That's why, beyond education, you need to pursue things like language training, certifications or, more recently, internships to gain some competitive edge in the labor market.”

Companies’ tendency to prefer hiring those who already have significant job experience as opposed to new recruits is also accelerating the spec war, said Kim.

“The dual structure of Korea’s labor market is inherently polarized, so jobs at large corporations, regular positions and with labor unions are the core elements defining quality employment,” said Kim. “These areas inevitably attract excessive wage premiums, and compounded by the concentration in the Seoul metropolitan area, it's only natural that young people's preferences gravitate toward these quality jobs, intensifying the competition.”

Students are seen studying at a cram private academy in Gangnam District, southern Seoul on Aug. 5. [YONHAP]

Competition, competition

The competition for jobs exemplified through the spec war is even more complicated upon closer glance. In Korea’s hiring market, the funnel for first jobs has narrowed while experience and big-firm premiums have soared, leaving a glut of degree holders chasing a shrinking tier of “quality” seats and stacking specs to keep pace.

“We’re seeing fewer entry-level intakes and a clear preference for experienced hires,” said Kim. “That by definition, pushes young people to accumulate ‘experience-like’ specs before their first full-time job.”

“No graduate is born with experience,” added Kim. “Yet companies keep shrinking new-hire funnels and asking for it [experienced new hires]. In the past, firms hired first and trained. That social responsibility has weakened, and the bargaining power sits with employers, so job seekers keep stacking specs to keep up.”

The data lines up with that picture — Korea’s job openings-to-applicants ratio hit 0.28 in January this year, measured 0.37 in May and 0.39 in June, the weakest for those months in decades, and was 0.43 in April.

Applicants wait for interviews at a job fair held at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul on Aug. 20. [YONHAP]

“Specs are not just qualifications; they have become what I call ‘employment assets,’” Shin said. “Once both employers and students came to treat specs as indispensable signs of competence, the competition hardened into a self-reinforcing system.”

Meanwhile, six in 10 of Korea’s top 500 companies reported no or undecided plans to recruit new graduates in the first half of this year, an unmistakable headwind for entry-level candidates, though last week’s recruitment announcement may change this aspect.

Job quality gaps are also wide, with non-regular workers, including contracted workers and gig workers, making up 38.2 percent of wage earners in 2024, with an average monthly pay of around 2.05 million won versus 3.79 million won for regular workers — disparities that intensify the queue for a small share of "premium" jobs.

“In hiring, the problem is domination,” Shin pointed out. "Companies hold monopoly control over opportunities while job seekers have only limited freedom. Republican freedom means eliminating not just interference but the possibility of arbitrary control — and that requires curbing employers’ discretion.”

Private academies, known as hagwon, are seen on a street in Dogok-dong in Gangnam District, southern Seoul on July 23. [WOO SANG-JO]

A toll on youth health

Behind the hiring statistics sits a quieter cost: The spec war leaves as much psychological damage as it does economic.

A growing body of research links job-search strain to mental health harm among Korean youth. Studies find that higher job-seeking stress is associated with depression, anxiety and lower levels of "flourishing," measured by having a sense of purpose, positive interpersonal relationships and more; social support partially buffers the damage, according to research in the Journal of Korean Medical Science by doctors at Seoul National University’s College of Medicine, including Lim Ah-young.

“The spec war also conditions students into submission,” Shin argued. “After battling to accumulate credentials, they are more likely to accept the authority of companies as dominant gatekeepers. It’s a psychological toll that extends beyond the job market, feeding political disillusionment or even conservatism among youth.”

More broadly, unemployment or acute work loss correlates with psychological distress while overworking has been tied to measurable brain-level stress, according to another study by Yoon Myeong-sook at Jeonbuk National University.

“I feel that I am so stressed about the prospect of getting a job and building up my specs that it seems like the natural state,” said Choi, the university student who deferred graduation for the sake of getting more specs. “I think I am not alone in this."

“If social insurance is designed to cushion income shocks — so people can smooth consumption during job search — you reduce the urge to ‘over-invest’ in specs just to avoid risk,” said Ahn. “With a sturdier safety net and easier mobility, the pressure to chase only the safest jobs eases.”

Job seekers read notices for new position openings at a job fair held at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul on Aug. 20. [WOO SANG-JO]

Change in the air?

After years of “score-first” hiring, a different refrain is creeping into campus conversations and recruiter debriefs — hours that end, managers who coach, parental leave that’s real.

“Students are more attracted to stability and workplaces with real family-friendly policies like shorter hours and generous parental leave than they used to be,” said Ahn.

Surveys echo that tilt, with HR service company Randstad’s 2025 global survey on workplace priorities showing that work-life balance edged out pay as the top priority, and 63 percent of young Korean workers saying that work-life balance is more important than wages, according to a poll conducted by the Ministry of Employment and Labor and the Korea Employment Information Service in November of last year.

Parents and students are seen at a conference on college applications at a private academy in Gangnam District, southern Seoul on Sept. 6. [YONHAP]

The sentiment shows up in interviews and advisement sessions alike — work-life balance is no longer a soft extra but a stated threshold, even as pay remains a close rival.

Still, Korea ranks 31st out of 60 economies in a 2025 global work-life balance index, according to HR platform Remote, evidence that preferences may be changing faster than workplace reality.

Experts caution, however, that this is not a values revolution so much as a market response: When entry routes narrow and big-firm premiums concentrate, young workers start to prize predictability and a humane workload as part of the bargain.

“Firms promote ‘culture fit’ as if it were progressive, but often it just means recruiting people who will obey,” Shin said. “Unless companies are transparent about their criteria, schedules and feedback, work-life balance rhetoric will remain secondary to the structural dominance employers wield.”

Taken together, the preferences are shifting faster than the workplace, and unless hiring design, job quality and transparency change in tandem, the spec war will bend at the margins but not break.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]