-KOTRA opened a webinar-style job fair (Apr. 7- 16)

The grand opening of a virtual job fair (Apr. 7- 16) hosted by Korea Trade Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA: President and CEO, Pyung-Oh, Kwon) came to an end. The online career fair, specially designed to help foreign invested companies in Korea stimulate labor markets as the widespread of the coronavirus has begun to ripple across the employment landscape, reportedly invited eight foreign investors (foreign invested companies), along with over a thousand job seekers.

These eight investors (manufacturing: 5, service: 2, IT: 1) unveiled an outline of their employment plan which indicates how many employees they want to work with and which position is currently vacant. Three of them, whose HR team is based overseas, ran the session in Japan and Canada each. And the rest five opened the session in the video conferencing room in the head office of KOTRA.

The job fair this time taking almost an hour for each took place using a webinar software tool on Zoom. With given log-in IDs, applicants were able to have access anywhere. 

Most foreign invested companies in Korea are reported to be smoothly handling the current drastic change brought by the corona-shock. They, who’ve long kept in touch with each headquarters online and built up expertise in untact business, have started to ramp up remote working since the outbreak of the deadly virus. 

However, chances are not a small group of investors had no choice but to totally scrap employment plans as KOTRA’s job fair set to be held early this month was delayed indefinitely. 

Chang Sang- hyun, commissioner of Invest KOREA, said “It’s highly concerning that labor markets are likely to be in poor shape as a lot of foreign investors in Korea are reluctant to have new employees.”, adding that “KOTRA will make an all-out effort by running this type of online events more often until job market can bounce back”

Source : KOTRA (2020.04.07)