Fair Hiring Procedures Act · Blind Hiring
Fair Hiring Procedure Act & Blind Recruitment
What is the Fair Hiring Procedures Act?
- How the law limits requests for job-irrelevant information
- Decide what to mask based on job relevance
- Masking details without criteria falls back on gut-feel evaluation
What this law changes is not the mindset of recruiters but the application form, the interview question sheet, and the record of when documents were discarded. A pledge to avoid bias can’t be verified, but whether the family-assets field has been removed from the application, whether the question sheet includes marriage plans, and when rejected candidates’ documents were destroyed can all be checked at a glance. Fair hiring starts with a form audit, not an attitude check. In practice, the safest assumption is that if the field is still there, the question will eventually get asked in the interview too.
The Fair Hiring Procedures Act applies mainly to workplaces with 30 or more regular employees. It expressly prohibits false job advertisements, coercion into hiring, and requests for personal information not needed to perform the job. Items employers may not request include the applicant’s own height, weight, and appearance, place of origin, marital status, and assets, as well as the education, occupation, and assets of parents, children, and siblings. The law also sets deadline-bound obligations, such as notifying applicants of hiring results and keeping or returning hiring documents on request, so managing the filing cabinet is itself legal compliance. A point often confused: blind hiring is an operating method, not a legal requirement. The law does not uniformly ban education or school names, but public-institution guidelines mask them, so what the law prohibits and what blind hiring masks overlap but are not the same.
The point where practice most often goes wrong is the misconception that “hiding information makes it fair.” If you also erase the evidence for judging the job, such as certifications, equipment operation experience, and research results, evaluators decide on whatever is left, and in the end speech style, impressions, and the first three minutes of the interview decide the outcome. Unless you add as many questions and scoring criteria as you have hidden, blind hiring removes evaluation rather than making it fair. The opposite case is common too. If the forms are fixed but the interviewer opens with “Where do you live? What do your parents do?” as an icebreaker, the earlier work is pointless, and if rejected candidates’ documents have been piling up for years, a data privacy incident is likely to hit first.
Kyungtae KimHR expert · Organizational culture and HR strategy consultant
Jongmu KimCorporate talent development and job competency specialistAs unfair hiring practices became a social issue, Korea enacted the Act on Fair Hiring Procedures to define employer obligations. Blind hiring, which excludes information unrelated to the job, was then introduced and spread, led by public institutions.
Company A, a Korean food manufacturer with 240 employees and annual revenue of about KRW 90 (≈ US$1) billion, hires production and R&D staff through two open recruitment rounds a year. Its application form still had the same 15-year-old fields for family members’ occupations and assets, and some 2,000 rejected candidates’ files had been piling up in the HR cabinet for three years. When an internal audit in February flagged both issues at once, the team began overhauling the form. (Hypothetical example)
- When HR team lead Kim ranked all 38 application fields by job relevance, 9 fields failed the test, including marital status, family education, and height. Kim deleted them all on the spot.
- When the head of production held out, saying “I don’t hire without seeing a face,” Team Lead Kim presented data showing that 12 of the 17 early resignees over the past three years had ranked near the top in interview scores, and removed the photo field from the first-round application.
- Research roles use a partial blind process: certifications, papers, and equipment experience are kept, but only the school name is replaced with 'University A' before the application reaches evaluators.
- Recruiter Lee gave 14 interviewers 12 job-related questions and a 5-point rating sheet, and posted the rule 'Do not ask about residence, family relationships, or marriage plans' as a printout on every interview desk.
- They revised the records policy to destroy hiring documents 180 days after the hiring decision, and shredded the 2,100+ files in the cabinet after a notice period for returning them.
- In the next open recruitment round, applicants rose from 1,180 to 1,430, hires from universities outside the Seoul area went from 31% to 49%, and early resignations within six months of joining fell from 9 to 3.