▲ Hiring market for the second half of 2026
About 8 out of 10 domestic companies plan to hire employees in the second half of this year.
However, the survey showed that while hiring scales and budgets have decreased, "long-tail hiring"—recruiting necessary personnel on an as-needed basis—is spreading.
According to HR tech platform Job Korea on the 10th, the results of a "2026 Second Half Hiring Trends" survey conducted among 569 corporate human resources managers from July 14 to 31 showed that 78.7% of companies have hiring plans for the second half.
Among them, 61.2% reported plans for "partial recruitment by department and job role," while 17.6% planned "company-wide recruitment."
The scale of recruitment has decreased somewhat.
Companies planning to hire "10 or fewer" employees in the second half accounted for 78.9%, up 18.4 percentage points from the previous year's survey.
Meanwhile, companies planning to hire 11 to 30 people (8.6%) and 101 or more people (2.8%) decreased by 10.2 percentage points and 4.5 percentage points, respectively.
Budgets were also cut down, with 74.3% of companies planning a second-half hiring budget of "less than 3 million won," a 37.5 percentage point increase compared to the previous year.
Among them, "less than 1 million won" accounted for 37.2%, and responses stating "no budget execution (0 won)" reached 22.8%.
On the other hand, companies planning to spend "10 million won or more" dropped by 24.3 percentage points to 13.2%.
Hiring periods also appeared to be dispersed into rolling recruitment rather than specific seasons.
"Rolling recruitment throughout the second half" was the most common at 42.6%, followed by July to September (29.2%), October to December (17.4%), and undecided (10.8%).
Job Korea defined this trend of expanding small-scale and rolling recruitment as long-tail hiring.
The platform explained that methods of filling necessary personnel year-round on an ad-hoc basis are spreading rather than large-scale open recruitment centered around specific seasons.
Meanwhile, as companies must continue rolling recruitment with limited budgets, the scope of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI)-based recruitment solutions is also expanding.
Responses indicating that AI is used in recruitment tasks surged by 46.6 percentage points to 80.8%, and 33.2% of respondents stated they entrust more than half of their tasks to AI.
(Photo provided by Worksphere, Yonhap News)
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