Checking the job boards felt like watching a slow-motion collapse

Watching the numbers drop instead of rising

I spent most of last Tuesday staring at a spreadsheet I’d been keeping on my desktop. It wasn’t anything official, just a messy list of companies I’d been tracking for a few years, mostly because I kept thinking about jumping ship to somewhere bigger. You know how it goes when you’re bored at work—you start looking at job postings just to see if the grass is actually greener. But looking at the recent numbers, the grass didn’t just look brown; it looked like it was disappearing entirely. I noticed that companies like the Aekyung Group, which I always associated with a certain kind of stability, had cut over a thousand positions in just a year. It’s not like I didn’t see the headlines about AI-driven cutbacks, but seeing the actual headcount reductions for places like Lotte or SK in black and white made it feel way more real. It’s hard to stay motivated to update your resume when every search result feels like a signal that the door is slowly being locked.

The obsession with specific retail experience

One thing that really started bothering me was this hyper-fixation on niche experience. I kept seeing postings for positions where the key requirement wasn’t just ‘marketing’ or ‘sales,’ but specifically ‘Olive Young experience.’ It’s weird, right? It feels like the entire K-beauty retail sector is being swallowed up by one channel. Even companies like Aekyung seem to be restructuring their entire retail operations just to manage the relationship with that one specific storefront. I have friends in the industry who are basically losing their minds trying to pivot their entire career paths just to claim they’ve spent time managing an H&B partner account. It feels like we’re all becoming specialists in tiny, isolated silos rather than actually building broad skills. I sat there for an hour trying to figure out how to phrase my own history to look like I understood the nuance of their specific channel management, but eventually, I just closed the tab. It felt like I was writing fiction.

Is certification the only way out?

Then there’s the G-TELP obsession. I remember taking those tests back in college—they cost about 60,000 to 70,000 KRW per sitting, which isn’t cheap when you’re already worried about your monthly budget. Back then, it was just another box to check for graduation. Now, it’s like this mandatory gatekeeper for almost every major conglomerate, whether it’s for a standard corporate role or something more specialized. I found myself looking at the test schedule for a 7th-grade civil servant prep course, wondering if I should just pay the fee and go sit in a cold exam hall for three hours again. It’s a strange feeling, being in your late twenties or early thirties and feeling like you need to prove your English proficiency all over again just to get someone to read your application. I’m not even sure if the score matters as much as the fact that you’ve done it, but that doesn’t make the wait time for the results any less stressful.

The reality of hiring as a growth cost

I was reading about how some of the newer, faster-growing companies like APR treat hiring as a way to fuel growth rather than just an expense. It sounded nice in the article, but in practice, it just sounds exhausting. They’re moving at a pace that makes the older, more established giants look like they’re standing still. It’s strange to compare them. On one side, you have these legacy groups dealing with organizational bloat and layoffs, and on the other, you have this ‘growth-at-all-costs’ model. I remember looking at a posting for an entry-level role that asked for a portfolio that looked like it required three years of professional agency work. I don’t know where the middle ground is anymore. It’s not that I’m lazy, but the sheer amount of ‘pre-work’—the certifications, the specific retail background, the portfolio polish—is starting to outweigh the actual potential for a stable career.

Stuck in the uncertainty of waiting

I still have the link to that hiring dashboard for the chemical plants down in Busan and Gyeongnam open on my second monitor. I keep clicking it, hoping maybe the list has changed, or that the headcount numbers have stabilized. They haven’t. Some of those firms were hiring heavily a couple of years ago, but now it’s just crickets. I’ve reached the point where I’m not even looking for a ‘better’ job anymore; I’m just looking for a sign that there’s a place to land. It’s a weird, hovering kind of existence. I don’t think I’m going to apply to anything this week. Maybe it’s better to just wait and see if the market adjusts, though I know that’s probably just an excuse to procrastinate. There’s something deeply unfulfilling about refreshing a job portal only to see the same stale listings from three months ago. I think I’ll just close the laptop and try again next month, even though I have a sinking feeling that nothing will be different.