JobKorea, which marks its 30th anniversary this year, has declared sweeping changes with a goal of becoming an "AI-native recruitment platform". It is moving beyond the level of routine slogans rolled out to match trends with each new year.

The company says both job seekers and employers will clearly feel that the JobKorea service experience has fundamentally changed. A revamp of its app and web pages for job seekers in January will kick things off.

In a recent interview with a reporter, Lee Chang-jun, JobKorea's CSO and head of strategic initiatives, said the company has completely reworked the interface, design, categories and structure to deliver an experience beyond a bulletin board. He said existing users will feel a surprising change. The shift will be large enough to make people think, "Is this really JobKorea?" he said.

Along with the app and website revamp, an AI agent for job seekers called "Talent Agent" will be moved to the forefront. Talent Agent is positioned as a career agent focused on providing an experience of talking with a headhunter. Lee said test results show it seems to perform better than a junior headhunter, even if it may fall short for senior users.

On the company-wide changes, Lee stressed that technology, including AI, is only a means, and that the core is to strengthen the fundamentals of JobKorea as a recruitment platform.

He summed up those fundamentals as connecting job seekers and hiring companies to ultimately increase hiring. He said that has not changed much from when JobKorea started to now. Lee said job seekers come to JobKorea in large numbers to find places that are not well known but are good, rather than companies everyone knows. He said hiring companies want to make their companies known to job seekers and find people with the skills they want. Connecting the two is JobKorea's role, he said, and that will not change going forward.

Lee said the essence of a recruitment platform remains the same, but the hiring environment has changed a lot. Rolling recruitment, rather than scheduled recruitment announcements, has become the mainstream. In many cases, companies hire 1 person at a time as needed. Employee tenure at companies is also getting shorter.

JobKorea's service, in many respects, is still rooted in the old hiring environment, when open recruitment was common. That is why JobKorea is calling for sweeping changes. It is to improve the service to fit the recent hiring environment and increase hiring, the "essence of the business," in both quantity and quality.

Lee said that when open recruitment was common, people flocked to find those companies, and hiring companies focused on how to make their postings stand out. In today's hiring environment, he said, it is important to recommend targets that could interest both job seekers and hiring companies. He said JobKorea needs to uncover hidden strengths and show potential. Every company has value, he said, and there are people who fit it. To do that, he said, personalisation capabilities are important. The strategic value of personalised experiences in HR is greater than in e-commerce, he said.

Ultimately, understanding job seekers and companies well and connecting them as effectively as possible is the key phrase for the changes JobKorea is pursuing. Lee said hiring companies want to know, beyond a resume, what a job seeker is interested in and what kind of career the person dreams of. If job seekers can talk with JobKorea through services such as Talent Agent, he said, it can learn more about what job seekers need.

On connection, he said understanding someone and connecting well are technically different. In connection, he said, it is important to understand who the person is, depict that based on data, and optimise how to surface it so it leads to clicks.

JobKorea's service revamp is also being carried out in that direction.

For hiring companies, JobKorea has first revamped its products so they pay based on performance, rather than spending money on advertising aimed at simple exposure.

JobKorea's "SmartFit," unveiled last year, is a performance-based model that sets advertising costs according to corporate hiring results. It calculates costs based on actual applicant inflows rather than charging for ad exposure. With a click-based charging structure, in which costs arise only when a job seeker clicks a posting, companies can freely register or stop postings. Lee said SmartFit is helping JobKorea evolve in the HR industry from an open-recruitment-style banner to a performance-based model, for the first time in the industry.

Another point Lee emphasised as a new experience is linking JobKorea's recruitment management solution, NineHire (an ATS, Applicant Tracking System), with the JobKorea platform and an AI agent.

Lee said the weight of the ATS will grow more than it is now in an HR experience where companies do not register postings directly on JobKorea, but first upload them to NineHire and connect to JobKorea. He said it will become more important which recruitment tool a company uses rather than simply posting on a recruitment site. In that structure, he said, NineHire's role will expand beyond software as a service to that of an AI agent that helps with hiring.

Late last year, JobKorea acquired the JobPlanet career platform and related business operated by BrainCommerce. Lee said the JobPlanet acquisition is also part of strengthening understanding and connection capabilities. He said many job seekers visit JobPlanet and then come to JobKorea. In the process of considering an AI agent, he said JobPlanet was needed to explain more three-dimensionally which companies would suit a job seeker. He said JobPlanet has many posts offering various angles. A lot of negative content has been widely known externally, he said, but there is also a lot that is not.

JobKorea plans to upgrade JobPlanet in a direction that strengthens its character as a social service. Lee said simple company reviews are less vivid, and there needs to be a space where people can directly talk with someone who works at a company they are interested in.

JobKorea will also strengthen cooperation with various external services, with the goal of increasing hiring. Cooperating with Blind and Toss is in that context.

The changes JobKorea is pursuing are closer to a journey than a one-off. It has achieved results of its own, but there is still a long way to go. Lee said it needs improvement, but it has laid a meaningful foothold to accelerate change. He said JobKorea's goal is not to stop at collecting information and making recommendations, but to be able to persuade users why it recommended a company and what career path they can take. He said change is hard to start, but once it produces results, what follows is different. He stressed that future change will gain even more momentum.