SK will recruit more to help job market

Conglomerate also seeks to extend help to smaller partner firms

SK Group, one of the country’s top corporations, will be recruiting more employees and trying to settle more accounts in cash to its partner firms as part of its latest plans for making a bigger contribution to community. 

SK on Thursday said it will be recruiting some 2,600 new workers this year, up 30 percent from the 2,000 it initially planned to select. 

The company has already recruited a total of 1,100 employees in the first half of this year, so it will be selecting an additional 1,500 in the latter half, company officials said.

Overall, the recruitment plans reflect a greater than 60 percent increase from the 1,600 that SK Group recruited last year. 

“We decided to recruit more people as a part of our strategy for going global, and also because we have been expanding our businesses at home as well,” one employee said. 

The plans for the increased recruitment also reflect the government’s latest calls for larger corporations to help create more jobs to overcome the lackluster job market conditions.

The overall jobless rate is not too high -- at around 3.5 percent, but youths aged between 15 and 29 continue to find it acutely difficult to find work.

The jobless rate for that age bracket reached over 8 percent in the past year. 

The move from SK comes as more corporations face a bigger responsibility to contribute to social and economic well-being. Citing the government support lent to the firms amid the previous year’s economic troubles, President Lee Myung-bak has been fervently urging the corporate sector to deliver on its promise to create 400,000 new jobs this year. 

Chey Tae-won, the chairman of SK Group, recently is said to have told his CEOs that bigger companies have an obligation to help smaller businesses and the middle or lower-class to learn how to “catch the fish on their own,” so that they cancontinue to be competitive. 

To help create more jobs for the less advantaged, SK also said it would seek to make 10,000 new social jobs by 2012, up from the current 6,000. SK will seek to establish a total of 28 social enterprises over the next two years to add 3,600 more jobs in order to achieve its 10,000 target.