Two Out of Three Companies Plan to Hire This Year

[Financial News] Two out of three companies plan to hire new employees this year.
On the 14th, career platform Saramin surveyed 327 companies on their plans for full-time hiring in 2026 and found that 65.7% responded that they have hiring plans for this year. This is an increase of 2.5 percentage points from last year’s survey result of 63.2%.
By company size, the share of firms with hiring plans was highest among those with 300 or more employees (73.7%), followed by those with 100–299 employees (71.4%) and those with fewer than 100 employees (64.6%).
Conversely, 21.1% of companies said they have no hiring plans for this year, while 13.2% answered that their plans are undecided. Compared with last year’s shares of companies with no hiring plans (23.1%) or undecided (13.7%), these figures are down 2 percentage points and 0.5 percentage points, respectively.
Among companies planning to hire full-time employees this year, the most common reason, cited by 64.2% (multiple responses allowed), was that their current workforce is insufficient. This was followed by business expansion (26.5%), securing high-caliber talent (26.5%), anticipated employee resignations (26%), and expectations of strong performance this year (7%).
Among companies hiring full-time employees this year, 65.6% said they plan to recruit both entry-level and experienced workers. Those planning to hire only experienced workers accounted for 22.8%, while 11.6% said they would hire only entry-level staff.
Companies hiring entry-level employees most frequently cited manufacturing and production roles (33.7%, multiple responses) as their main entry-level positions. This was followed by sales and sales management (24.1%), R&D (16.9%), service (9.6%), finance and accounting (9.6%), and IT development and data roles (8.4%).
For entry-level hiring, rolling recruitment was the most common method at 63.3%. Another 27.7% said they would use both open recruitment drives and rolling recruitment, while 9% said they would hire entry-level staff solely through open recruitment. In effect, nine out of ten companies plan to hire entry-level employees on a rolling basis.
For experienced hires, companies most often planned to recruit in manufacturing and production (28.4%, multiple responses), followed by sales and sales management (22.6%), R&D (12.1%), IT development and data (10.5%), service (8.4%), and planning and strategy (7.4%).
The most common method for hiring experienced workers was rolling or ongoing recruitment, cited by 78.9% (multiple responses). This was followed by talent searches via recruitment platforms (22.6%), open recruitment for experienced positions (19.5%), internal referrals (13.7%), and the use of headhunters (4.2%).

butter@fnnews.com Kang Kyung-rae Reporter