Korea's Connections Culture (Inmaek) Isn't Strongest at the Top. It's Strongest at the Bottom.
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Watching the Koreans
Korea's Connections Culture (Inmaek) Isn't Strongest at the Top. It's Strongest at the Bottom.
In short
Personal connections shaping who gets hired in Korea is a well-known problem in visible, prestigious jobs like university appointments. What's less obvious is that the same dynamic may run even stronger in small, unglamorous jobs nobody thinks to scrutinize — while some of Korea's most competitive white-collar hiring is oddly harder to network your way into than people assume.
Ask around about how someone landed a university professorship in Korea, and you'll hear some version of the same caveat almost every time: publish as much as you want, get cited as much as you want, and it still may not be enough. Timing, luck, and — very often, said with a shrug rather than outrage —
baek
baek (백) — literally "backing"; someone's personal or institutional connections used to influence a decision in their favor, typically a hiring or promotion decision.
That's the version of Korean connections culture most outsiders already expect: elite, competitive, credential-heavy fields where a recommendation from the right senior figure can outweigh the paper record. What's more interesting — and much less discussed — is how far down the job ladder that same logic seems to reach.
The version everyone already assumes
Professor hiring is the obvious case because it's the one people are willing to complain about publicly. Search Korean academic community forums and you'll find candidates openly comparing notes on how little their publication record seemed to matter next to which senior professor was willing to make a call on their behalf. It's discussed as an open secret rather than a shocking discovery — annoying, occasionally infuriating, but familiar enough that nobody treats it as news.
That familiarity is worth pausing on. A hiring dynamic doesn't get treated as background noise unless enough people have personally run into it to compare notes. Whether or not every individual case involves outright wrongdoing, the pattern itself — credentials alone rarely being sufficient — is widely enough acknowledged to function as common knowledge among the people it affects most directly.
The word underneath the assumption
Baek is the word doing most of the work here, and it's worth being precise about what it does and doesn't mean. It isn't necessarily bribery, and it isn't necessarily illegal. In its mildest form, it's closer to what "knowing someone" does in any country — a warmer introduction, a benefit of the doubt, a phone call that gets a resume read more carefully. What makes baek distinct as a concept is how openly it's named and discussed as its own category of advantage, separate from qualifications, rather than something people pretend doesn't factor in.
The more serious end of the same spectrum has its own name too:
nakhasan
nakhasan (낙하산) — literally "parachute"; someone placed into a position from outside the normal process through political or personal connections, dropped in rather than having climbed up.
How big is this, actually?
This isn't just a mood or a running joke — it's serious enough that Korea runs a standing government audit for it. South Korea's Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission conducts a recurring nationwide investigation into hiring practices across roughly 1,400 public corporations and public agencies. Its most recent full sweep, completed in 2023, flagged 867 cases of improper hiring practices — including self-directed hiring plans and score manipulation specifically to rescue an acquaintance's application from rejection.
That a national anti-corruption body runs this as a standing, recurring program — not a one-off scandal response — tells you the problem isn't confined to a few bad actors. It's institutionalized enough, even in the public sector where hiring is supposed to be the most standardized, that Korea maintains permanent infrastructure just to keep checking for it.
The surprising part: it shows up smaller, not bigger
Here's the part that's harder to prove with a government audit, because nobody runs a nationwide investigation into it: baek doesn't only operate at the university-appointment or public-corporation level. It shows up, by casual account, in far smaller and more mundane hiring decisions — an apartment complex looking for a building security guard or an on-site bookkeeper, filled through a resident's recommendation rather than a public posting at all.
I want to be careful about how I say this, because I don't have a formal study to point to for that specific claim — it's something that circulates as lived experience and secondhand accounts rather than documented research. But the logical reason it would be true is fairly straightforward: small, one-off hiring decisions like these are exactly the ones with no formal posting, no HR department, and no oversight body checking the process afterward. The 867 cases above exist because there's a system checking for them. A single building manager filling one security-guard opening this month has no equivalent system watching at all — which is precisely the condition under which personal connections operate most freely.
Connections don't need to be strongest where the stakes are highest. They only need to be strongest where nobody's checking.
Where connections stop working as well
Which makes the opposite case worth naming too: Korea's large-scale corporate hiring — the standardized, once-or-twice-a-year mass recruitment rounds that big companies run — is arguably harder to network your way into than hiring in plenty of countries with a reputation for being more "merit-based." A Korean conglomerate's public hiring cycle typically runs every applicant through the same written aptitude test, the same document screening, and the same structured interview panel, regardless of who referred them.
Compare that to a country like the United States, where a letter of recommendation from the right person is a formally built-in, expected part of nearly every competitive application — for graduate school, for many white-collar jobs, sometimes even required by the process itself. In that light, a system that requires a personal reference to even be considered is arguably more connection-dependent by design than one that runs every applicant through an identical written test. Ordinary corporate hiring in Korea, ironically, may be one of the more standardized, connection-resistant lanes available — precisely because it's public, high-volume, and impossible to quietly route around.
The real pattern isn't "connections or merit"
Put together, the picture that emerges isn't "Korea runs on connections" versus "Korea runs on merit" — it's that the strength of baek tracks almost perfectly with how much oversight exists at each level of the hiring process. Academia has enough public scrutiny that people openly complain about it but not enough structural safeguard to fully prevent it. Public corporations get audited nationally and still produce hundreds of flagged cases a cycle. Small, informal jobs have no equivalent audit at all, and by casual account, connections move the most freely there. Large-scale standardized corporate hiring, built around identical tests for every applicant, may be the one lane where a stranger with no connections at all has a genuinely fair shot.
None of this means merit doesn't matter in Korea — plenty of people build careers on exactly that. It means the honest answer to "how much do connections matter here" was never a single number. It depends entirely on whether anyone's watching the door you're trying to walk through.
Inmaek and academic seniority run on related logic — the admission-year hierarchy inside Korean universities is often where these connections get built in the first place, long before they turn into the kind of family obligation now showing up in actual filial-duty contracts.
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