[1mm Financial Talk] "KakaoBank Hires New Employees for the First Time in 6 Years Since Opening"

Selected Over 20 New Graduate Developers in April
Final Employment After Internship
Implemented Horizontal 'Buddy System' for Actual Team Work

Hiring Plans for Second Half of This Year
Shift from Preferring Experienced to Nurturing New Employees

Wade (left), who joined KakaoBank as a new employee in April this year, and his buddy Peter (right) are working at the KakaoBank Pangyo office.

[Asia Economy Reporter Sim Nayoung] "When the CEO and CTO fight, the CTO wins" is an unwritten rule in Pangyo. Simply put, when the company’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer clash, the CTO’s opinion should take precedence. This phrase also reflects the status of developers in the IT industry. While it is important to recruit developers who can handle the work of a hundred people, discovering and nurturing such developers is also the role of IT companies in Pangyo. This is why KakaoBank hired about 20 new college graduate recruits for the first time last April.

A KakaoBank representative said, "Since opening in 2016, except for a few interns from part-time jobs or non-developer positions, we have never hired a large number of new employees at once," adding, "We hired new developers after a two-month evaluation period from February to April this year through a recruitment-linked internship program."

KakaoBank’s method of selecting experienced developers is well-known. They assign a coding task before the interview, and candidates who pass the first stage proceed to the interview. The interview evaluators are developers who will work in the same team after joining. They review the submitted task together, discuss the coding process and results, and sometimes request alternative coding methods on the spot. Both evaluators and candidates are proactive because the team’s performance improves only when capable developers join. For candidates, it is also an opportunity to understand the team’s capabilities in advance.

The new developer recruitment process was also conducted horizontally. During the internship, one or two buddies (senior developers) were matched with each intern to work on actual team issues, improve them, and perform tasks such as prototyping (the process of repeatedly building and refining an initial model of the system). Interns carried out these tasks with their matched buddies, received interim feedback, and made a final presentation in front of the team members.

Wade (Kang Junbeom, belonging to the Analysis Engineering Team), who joined KakaoBank this time, said, "I graduated from the Department of Information and Communication Engineering, and all my friends who took classes with me were interested enough to apply to KakaoBank," adding, "The internship program was structured so that interns were assigned to teams that needed manpower and performed tasks rather than competing for conversion, which helped create a collaborative atmosphere within the team."

There is also an evaluation that the program had a positive impact on existing developers. Peter (Kim Hyunwoo), who was Wade’s buddy, said, "Things that were familiar to us might look different from the perspective of new employees," adding, "The process of creating the necessary technology as colleagues working together helped everyone."

This new employee recruitment signals externally that KakaoBank, which until now was in the ‘Rising Star’ phase favoring experienced hires due to rapid growth, is now transitioning to the ‘Cash Cow’ phase with the capacity to nurture developers as it has entered a growth trajectory. KakaoBank’s operating profit in the first quarter of this year was 88.4 billion KRW, a 63.8% increase from the previous year, marking the highest quarterly figure. They plan to conduct a second recruitment-linked internship program in the second half of this year. Currently, about 40% of KakaoBank’s approximately 1,000 employees are developers.