Why ‘Secret Hiring’ is Leaving Job Seekers in the Dark

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Calls to address “secret hiring”—job postings that omit key information such as salary—have surfaced repeatedly, yet they have not produced meaningful reform. Salary details, in particular, remain highly sensitive inside companies and are rarely disclosed.

Secret hiring refers to job ads that fail to specify core terms of employment, such as pay or detailed duties. Most listings on recruitment portals currently describe salary with phrases like “per company policy” or “to be decided after negotiation,” which effectively amounts to secret hiring.

As a result, applicants enter hiring processes without clear salary information and, in many cases, only learn an offer’s financial terms at the final stage. After investing time and effort, candidates who receive offers below their expectations can suffer significant psychological and practical setbacks.

Some applicants try to gather information through informal channels such as employee communities, but reported salaries can vary widely depending on hiring date and role, making such tips unreliable.

South Korea’s Ministry of Employment and Labor recently launched a fact-finding investigation into secret hiring. It plans to conduct in-depth interviews with HR leaders at major companies and hold focus groups to assess hiring practices and identify changes needed to the Recruitment Procedures Act.

The president also supports reforming secret hiring. In March, President Lee Jae-myung attended a labor policy forum, criticized the practice of withholding salary information in job postings, and said, “Disclosing average pay within a roughly 10% band seems necessary,” urging concrete improvements.

This is not the government’s first attempt to curb secret hiring.

In 2023, under former President Yoon Suk-yeol, the presidential office listed secret hiring as one of 15 priority livelihood policy tasks. The office pledged to encourage companies to disclose wages and other working conditions in job postings, but the initiative produced no notable results.

There are several reasons why repeated calls for reform have failed to translate into practice.

A major obstacle is that wages are often treated as corporate secrets. Firms without standardized pay scales by role or rank commonly require employees to sign non-disclosure clauses about their compensation. Revealing an individual’s salary to coworkers can spark internal conflict.

The hiring process compounds the problem. While entry-level positions frequently have fixed starting salaries by role, pay for experienced hires varies substantially based on tenure, skills, and prior experience. That variability makes it difficult to state exact salaries in advance and raises equity concerns among existing staff.

HR professionals say mandating salary disclosure in job postings would be difficult in practice. As alternatives, they recommend posting salary ranges that include minimums and maximums or having the government publish industry-standard pay benchmarks to guide employers and applicants.