Worxphere CEO on turning JobKorea into AI-led hiring platform

Worxphere CEO Yoon Hyun-jun poses during an interview with The Korea Times at the Worxphere office in Gangnam District, Seoul, April 20. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk

Three decades after launching one of Korea’s earliest online job platforms, JobKorea, its operator has rebranded itself as Worxphere, making a bold pivot from a legacy job board to an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven human resources (HR) tech platform that integrates its services and data to match employers and workers across the entire lifecycle of work.

“We wanted to move beyond a name narrowly confined to ‘jobs’ and ‘Korea,’ and expand it to ‘work’ that covers the entire spectrum of what people do — under a new name that reflects our ambition to reinvent every work experience on the back of AI,” company CEO Yoon Hyun-jun said during a recent interview with The Korea Times at the Worxphere office in Gangnam District, Seoul.

The rebranding reflects a structural shift as the company is consolidating a fragmented portfolio of platforms — including JobKorea for full-time roles, Albamon for part-time work, applicant tracking system (ATS) provider Ninehire, workplace review site Jobplanet and expat-worker platform KLiK – into a unified ecosystem.

Yoon said the integrated ecosystem will allow job seekers to move seamlessly from part-time gigs to entry-level roles and later career transitions through a unified data platform across its services.

For employers, this allows them to manage full-time, hourly hiring, dispatch and contract roles through one interface, instead of juggling platforms or relying on headhunters for each need.

At the core of Worxphere’s new strategy is a shift away from the traditional posting‑and‑search model that has long defined online recruitment. It now moves toward a data‑driven infrastructure built around two key concepts: career genome and context link.

“Career genome is a technology that goes beyond the text of a resume to deconstruct a user’s capabilities, tendencies and achievements down to the atomic level and reassemble them as digital DNA,” Yoon said, explaining that the system ingests user‑submitted data, activity logs and even portfolio files across its platforms.

A promotional image from Worxphere's artificial intelligence-generated commercial / Courtesy of Worxphere

Rather than highlighting generic phrases such as strong communication skills, the AI breaks down the users’ data into thousands of weighted attributes in a high‑dimensional vector space to build and update their career genome map.

“Unlike a resume, which is just a fixed snapshot in time, this profile keeps changing as you act on the platform,” he said.

On top of that sits Context Link, a recommendation engine that combines large language models with an inference layer to turn both structured and free‑text data into vectors. By measuring distances and weights between those signals, the system aims to capture the story of a person’s career and the hiring context inside companies, rather than just matching keywords.

For users, the AI-powered Career Agent will be a personalized career concierge that proactively pushes relevant opportunities based on one’s career genome and behavior.

On the employer side, Talent Agent will function as a conversational search tool, through which HR managers describe their situation and ideal hire in natural language and the AI combs through past hiring data and internal and external talent pools to propose candidates. The goal is to understand hiring context, including team culture, growth stage and specific project history.

After an AI‑driven revamp of JobKorea and Albamon’s main pages in late January, the company saw a jump in click‑through rates on AI‑recommended postings by about 298 percent and 158 percent, respectively, while conversion rates from views to applications also rose sharply.

Over the next three years, the company plans to complete data integration across platforms and further advance context link before rolling out Career Agent and Talent Agent, which are set for initial release this year.

Worxphere CEO Yoon Hyun-jun speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at the Worxphere office in Gangnam District, Seoul, Monday. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk

The CEO said the ambition goes beyond rolling out agents, noting that Worxphere can play a greater role in the full HR cycle, from hiring to onboarding, career development and broader HR functions.

“For users, getting a first job is only the starting point; being able to steer and develop their careers in the direction they want matters just as much … But traditional HR platforms have been very fragmented in that regard. People inevitably run into difficulties at work and we plan to expand our service so it can offer features that help them resolve those issues as well,” he said.

He expects Worxphere’s already leading domestic position to strengthen as those services mature, targeting a more than 60 percent share of Korea’s online HR market to become the sole dominant player.

“In every industry that becomes more efficient and developed, you eventually see a dominant player emerge … In Korea’s online HR market, there is no global-scale HR operator, so the landscape remains fragmented and competition is still intense,” he said. "Through technological innovation, we hope to grow over the next three years into a company with far greater influence in this space.”