The salary field in second-half job postings reads 'per company policy' or 'negotiable after interview.' Without knowing how much they will be paid, job seekers polish their cover letters, schedule interviews and pay their own fares to travel to the company. At the 'Labor Policy Forum with the President' held at Cheong Wa Dae in March this year, this single line came under scrutiny.
At the forum, participants argued that employers should be required to state wages in job postings. Some also argued that postings that hide wages are a starting point for locking young people into low pay. No research examining a causal link between how postings are worded and low wages was presented alongside these arguments.
President Lee Jae-myung also said that a certain range of wages needs to be disclosed at the hiring stage.
The phrase 'negotiable after interview' pushes the moment an applicant learns the figure back to after the interview. If they walk away because they cannot accept that amount, the weeks spent writing applications and preparing for interviews are lost entirely. Young people looking for their first job have no experience to compare and no previous salary to use as a benchmark. They tend to accept whatever amount the company offers.
When wages are written in postings, things change. Applicants can compare several companies before applying, and companies advertising similar jobs also find it hard to avoid being compared with one another. The call for mandatory wage disclosure raised at the forum aims to stop information from being held by only one side before negotiations even begin.
The ball is now in the court of the Ministry of Employment and Labor. Changing the posting format requires the ministry in charge to set standards. So far, little has been disclosed about what position the labor ministry has taken on the issue.
In October, open recruitment application deadlines come one after another. The salary field, long hidden behind the words 'company policy,' has become a policy issue after the Cheong Wa Dae forum. Whether that field will be filled with an actual figure in postings for the next hiring season depends on when, and with what standards, the labor ministry comes forward.
