Worxphere CEO Yoon Hyun-jun poses during an interview with The Korea Times at the Worxphere office in Gangnam-gu, Seoul on April 20. Korea Times Photography: Choi Won-seok
Thirty years after launching JobKorea, one of South Korea’s earliest online recruitment platforms, its operator has rebranded to Worxphere and made a bold pivot from a traditional job site to an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven human resources (HR) technology platform that integrates services and data to match employers and workers across the entire job lifecycle.
“We wanted to go beyond the narrow names of “Work” and “Korea” and expand to “Work” to cover the full spectrum of people’s behavior under a new name that reflects our ambition to reinvent every working experience by leveraging AI,” CEO Yoon Hyun-jun told The Korea Times in a recent interview at Workphere’s office in Seoul’s Gangnam district.
The rebranding reflects a structural change as the company integrates its fragmented portfolio of platforms into a unified ecosystem, including JobKorea for full-time work, Albamon for part-time work, applicant tracking system (ATS) provider Ninehire, workplace review site Jobplanet, and expatriate platform KLiK.
Yun said the integrated ecosystem will enable job seekers to seamlessly transition from part-time jobs to entry-level jobs and subsequent career transitions through a unified data platform across services.
This allows employers to manage full-time, hourly, temporary, and contract roles in one interface, without having to use different platforms or rely on headhunters for each need.
At the core of Worxphere’s new strategy is a shift away from the traditional post-and-search model that has long defined online recruiting. We are now moving towards a data-driven infrastructure built around two key concepts: carrier genomes and context links.
“Career Genome is a technology that goes beyond resume text and decomposes a user’s abilities, tendencies, and accomplishments down to the atomic level and reconstructs them as digital DNA,” Yoon said, explaining that the system will ingest user-submitted data, activity logs, and even portfolio files across the platform.
Commercial promotional image generated by Worxphere’s artificial intelligence / Provided by Worxphere
Rather than emphasizing common phrases like strong communication skills, AI breaks down a user’s data into thousands of weighted attributes in a high-dimensional vector space to build and update a career genome map.
“Unlike a resume, which is just a fixed snapshot in time, this profile continues to change as you act on the platform,” he said.
On top of that is Context Link, a recommendation engine that combines a large language model and an inference layer to convert both structured and free text data into vectors. By measuring the distance and weight between these signals, the system aims to go beyond simply matching keywords to understanding an individual’s career story and employment status within a company.
For users, an AI-powered career agent becomes a personalized career concierge that proactively drives relevant opportunities based on an individual’s career genome and behaviors.
On the employer side, Talent Agent acts as a conversational search tool, where HR managers use natural language to describe their company and their ideal hire, and AI looks at past hiring data and internal and external talent pools to suggest candidates. The goal is to understand the context of the hire, including team culture, stage of growth, and history of specific projects.
After an AI-driven makeover of JobKorea and Albamon’s main pages in late January, the company saw click-through rates for AI-recommended posts increase by approximately 298 percent and 158 percent, respectively, and view-to-app conversion rates also skyrocketed.
Over the next three years, the company plans to complete data integration across platforms and further advance contextual linking before rolling out Career Agent and Talent Agent, with initial releases scheduled for this year.
Worxphere CEO Yoon Hyun-joon said this in an interview with The Korea Times on Monday at the Worxphere office in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Korea Times Photo provided by Choi Won-seok
The CEO said its ambitions go beyond agent deployment, noting that Worxphere can play a larger role in the entire HR cycle, from recruiting to onboarding, career development and broader HR functions.
“For our users, landing your first job is just the starting point. Being able to guide and develop your career in the direction you want is equally important… But traditional HR platforms have been very fragmented in that regard. People will inevitably encounter difficulties on the job, and we plan to expand our services to provide features that can help solve those problems as well,” he said.
He expects Worxphere, which already holds a leading position in the country, will strengthen as these services mature, with the goal of capturing more than 60 percent share of South Korea’s online HR market and becoming the sole dominant player.
“In any industry that becomes more efficient and develops, a dominant player will eventually emerge. There are no global HR operators in the Korean online HR market, so the situation remains fragmented and competition is still fierce,” he said. “Through innovation, we want to grow into a more influential company in this space over the next three years.”
