The Korea Fair Trade Commission is accelerating efforts to fill positions from its first round of staffing expansion, with a second wave of 237 new hires set for October. The agency wants to get the earlier batch of recruits — approved in March — up and running before the next expansion begins.

The task is proving difficult, however. Inter-agency transfers frequently fall through at the last minute, and luring lawyers, accountants and economics PhDs away from the private sector into a civil servant pay structure has emerged as the central challenge.

The full commission hearing room at the Fair Trade Commission's offices in the Government Complex Sejong in Eojin-dong, Sejong. [Fair Trade Commission]
The full commission hearing room at the Fair Trade Commission's offices in the Government Complex Sejong in Eojin-dong, Sejong. [Fair Trade Commission]

The Fair Trade Commission has filled about 60 percent of the 167 positions allocated under its March expansion plan, according to government sources Saturday.

The agency is running open recruitment, inter-agency transfers and private-sector career hiring in parallel to fill the remaining slots. It plans to wrap up most of the first-round hiring between late August and early September, after announcing results for career-hire applicants in July and August.

The push to complete the first round quickly is driven by the October expansion. The commission plans to bring in an additional 237 staff that month, lifting its total headcount from 815 — already up from 647 before the Lee Jae-myung administration took office — to 1,052. The agency will have grown by more than 400 positions in under a year.

There is no legal deadline for filling approved positions. Even so, the commission is pressing to hire as fast as possible, since the entire point of the expansion is to process a growing caseload more quickly.

"We are moving as fast as we can on hiring, because the expansion only delivers results once the new staff are actually doing the work," a Fair Trade Commission official said.

As part of that effort, the commission recently advertised for Grade 5 fixed-term career hires to be placed in several units, including the Corporate Transaction Adjudication Office, the Electronic Commerce Monitoring Division, the Subcontracting Investigation Division, the Technology Misappropriation Investigation Division, the New Industry Subcontracting Investigation Division, and the Construction Subcontracting Division of the Seoul Regional Fair Trade Office.

Filling the posts on schedule, however, is a separate challenge. Inter-agency transfers require the consent of the employee's home agency, and approvals sometimes collapse at the final stage. In one transfer exam held in connection with the expansion, several Ministry of Economy and Finance officials passed the test, but only one ultimately received home-agency approval and confirmed the move, sources said.

Private-sector career hiring has run into similar problems. Some candidates have withdrawn before completing the appointment process. Despite the multiple hiring channels the commission has opened, the actual conversion rate has been lower than expected, according to government sources.

The nature of the commission's work — which requires specialists in law, accounting and economics — adds another layer of difficulty. Recruiting experienced professionals from the private sector within the constraints of a civil servant pay scale is inherently hard, and concerns have been raised that the speed and scale of the hiring drive may make it difficult to screen candidates rigorously enough.

Interest in a Fair Trade Commission posting remains strong, however. When the large-scale hiring was announced, word spread through legal circles that even two or three years of investigation and review experience at the commission could significantly boost a lawyer's market value — a sign that a stint at the agency is seen as a genuine career asset in the private sector.

The influx of outside specialists also means the commission must pay closer attention to conflict-of-interest management. "Hires from major law firms are not the majority, but there is a possibility of conflicts arising in some cases," a commission official said. "We collect a pledge at the point of entry, conduct security training through the audit office, and exclude staff from relevant cases when necessary."

Managing the expanded organization after hiring is complete will be another test. New units — including a Priority Investigation Planning Group under the investigation management division and an Economic Analysis Bureau — are set to launch in October, and how quickly the commission can integrate the new staff and translate their numbers into real investigative capacity will be the key question.

"With headcounts rising sharply across every division at once, running the organization the way we always have simply won't work," a division chief-level official at the commission said. "Getting new staff up to speed quickly has become a major challenge in itself."

Sejong Backbl
Sejong Backbl

y2k@heraldcorp.com