“Experienced hires restricted to those born in 1980 or later and graduates of 11 universities” — Hanwha Aerospace apologizes over “discrimination controversy”

Apology posted under CEO Lee Bu-hwan’s name “Individual misconduct by an official… never implemented”

사진 확대 [News1]

Hanwha Aerospace has officially apologized over controversy surrounding internal guidelines that restricted education and age requirements during the recruitment of experienced hires.

The company explained, however, that the guidelines in question were not actually applied to recruitment and resulted from the individual misconduct of an HR official.

Lee Bu-hwan, CEO of Hanwha Aerospace, posted an apology on the company’s website on the 27th. “As a company that must fulfill its social responsibility through fair hiring, it should never have happened that guidelines were created containing provisions that could limit applicants’ opportunities based on personal conditions such as education and age, which are unrelated to job performance,” he said.

The controversy emerged after the Ministry of Employment and Labor began supervising allegations related to Hanwha Aerospace’s recruitment of experienced hires on the 16th.

The allegations claimed that Hanwha Aerospace had created guidelines for recruiting experienced employees that specified “those born in 1980 or later” and limited applicants to graduates of 11 universities in South Korea or overseas universities ranked among the top 100 globally. The guidelines were reportedly distributed to HR executives and recruitment officers in each business division.

사진 확대 [Screenshot from Hanwha Aerospace’s official website]

In his apology, Lee said, “This act directly undermined the fundamental principles of ‘open hiring’ and ‘providing fair opportunities,’ which Hanwha Aerospace has pursued. We are taking this incident extremely seriously.”

He also stated, “This matter was an obvious error: an improper guideline was distributed to the business units without internal consultation or thorough verification. We will issue stern warnings and impose disciplinary action on the departments and individuals responsible for creating and distributing the guideline.”

Hanwha Aerospace explained that “the controversial recruitment guideline for experienced hires was confirmed to have resulted from an HR official’s individual misconduct and was never implemented in any way.” The company said it had been conducting recruitment procedures for experienced hires that considered candidates from a range of educational backgrounds and age groups.

According to the company, Lee learned last month that an HR official had drafted recruitment guidelines for experienced hires that referred to specific universities and age groups. Early this month, he sent an email to all employees in the HR organization, as well as business division and department heads, warning those involved and stating that improper hiring would not be tolerated.

The company said it had referred those responsible for drafting the guideline to its personnel committee and was proceeding with disciplinary action.

It will also conduct a comprehensive review of its recruitment procedures. Hanwha Aerospace plans to closely analyze the hiring process, make improvements if any problems are found, and strengthen fair-hiring training for all employees.

Lee emphasized, “Fair hiring is the most basic form of justice and the fundamental obligation that a company must provide to society. We will take this incident as a painful lesson and ensure that unreasonable discrimination of this kind never occurs again.”

This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.