JobKorea (operated by Worksphere) said on Sunday that interest in performance-based hiring is rising, citing survey results that showed a spreading emphasis on cost efficiency in the recruitment market.

In a survey of 1,286 corporate members, 48.9 percent had hiring budgets below 5 million won. Companies running always-on hiring accounted for 40.0 percent. Another 37.2 percent said they hire in both the first and second half, with the survey finding that 8 out of 10 companies keep recruiting throughout the year.

Hiring is becoming more constant, but budgets remain limited, increasing the need for methods that allow more precise management of cost efficiency, JobKorea said.

About 45 percent of respondent companies said they feel a cost burden from existing paid recruitment products. A sizeable share either used paid products only to a limited extent (25.8 percent) or did not use them (19.7 percent).

Against that backdrop, JobKorea's performance-based hiring solution Smart Pick has nearly doubled the number of companies using it over the past three months since the service was launched, and the number of job postings placed rose 139 percent, the company said.

Park Sori (박소리), head of Worksphere's Business Transformation Office, said the hiring market is being reshaped around efficiency of results rather than simple spending. Smart Pick is one approach that helps companies manage recruitment outcomes more rationally amid those changes, Park said. The company plans to continue advancing the service based on data from actual hiring sites, Park added.