Six in Ten Korean College Students Give Up Active Job Search Amid Hiring Freeze

Six in ten Korean college students have fallen into a state of "passive job seeking," effectively giving up on finding employment amid a severe hiring freeze, a new survey showed.

The Korea Enterprises Federation (KEF) on Wednesday released results of its "2025 College Student Employment Perception Survey" conducted among 2,492 current students and graduates of four-year universities nationwide. The survey found that 60.5% of respondents were in a passive job-seeking state—either going through the motions of job hunting (32.2%), barely searching at all (21.5%), or taking a break from the search entirely (6.8%).

The findings underscore how prolonged economic stagnation has led companies to shut their doors to new hires, drastically reducing quality job opportunities. Experts warn that if the trend continues, long-term youth unemployment could become entrenched, eroding the nation's potential growth rate.

Job mismatch emerged as the primary reason for the passive approach. Respondents cited believing they would not find a job even if they searched (22.0%), a lack of jobs in their major or field of interest (16.2%), and insufficient positions with adequate wages and working conditions (13.6%). Combined, 51.8% pointed to job shortages as the reason for their reluctance to actively seek employment.

The most common single response was the need to better prepare by improving skills, knowledge, and capabilities (37.5%).

The job market feels frozen. Some 37.1% of respondents said this year's hiring market for new college graduates is worse than last year, up 0.6 percentage points from last year's survey (36.5%). Only 5.1% said conditions had improved.

Application success rates have plummeted. Active job seekers applied to an average of 13.4 positions this year but passed the document screening stage only 2.6 times on average. The document screening pass rate fell to 19.4%, down 2.8 percentage points from 22.2% last year. In other words, four out of five applications were rejected before candidates even reached the interview stage.

Pessimism about the length of job preparation is widespread. Some 62.6% of respondents expect their job search to take more than six months, while 32.5% anticipate a prolonged battle of over a year. According to Statistics Korea's Economically Active Population Survey, the proportion of long-term unemployed (over one year) among youth aged 20-34 rose from 53.2% in 2022 to 55.2% as of May this year.

Students agreed that expanding corporate hiring capacity is essential to resolving youth unemployment. They ranked regulatory reform and improvement of corporate employment conditions (29.9%) as the top policy priority, followed by addressing job mismatches through enhanced career guidance and expanded internship support (18.1%), and increasing vocational training opportunities in new industries and technologies (14.9%).

"Strengthened labor market regulations in Korea are reducing companies' capacity for new hires," said Lee Sang-ho, head of KEF's Economic and Industrial Division. "Policies that could shrink youth employment, such as extending the retirement age, should be approached cautiously."