Saramin, Wanted or JobKorea: which has the most postings open to foreigners?
I have been on an E-7 visa at an IT company for two years and my contract ends next month, so I am job hunting again. Saramin and JobKorea carry by far the most openings, but almost none of them say whether the employer will sponsor a visa, and Wanted has some English postings but far fewer in total.
Is there a way to filter for postings where the company actually hires foreign staff? Any signal I can check before spending an evening on an application would help.
1 Answer
On raw volume, Saramin and JobKorea carry far more postings than Wanted; on the share of listings written in English, Wanted comes out ahead. But none of the three offers an official filter that guarantees a company will sponsor a visa, so in practice you are filtering on wording and on what the employer is willing to do.
Start with the public side. Worknet (work.go.kr), run by the Ministry of Employment and Labour, keeps a separate section for jobs aimed at foreign workers, and companies that post there have usually been through the paperwork before. On the commercial platforms, typing terms straight into the search box — visa, sponsorship, English, 외국인 — gets you further than browsing categories, because the relevant phrases sit in the body text rather than in any structured field.
There are three signals worth reading in a posting. If the requirements mention military service or restrict applicants to Korean nationals, the door is effectively closed. If the posting itself is written in English, or the working language is listed as English, the odds that the company has hired foreign staff before go up sharply. And the company profile page is worth a look for mentions of a global team or an overseas entity.
The decisive factor is the employer, not the platform. E-7 works on the basis of an employer inviting you for a specific role, which means the company has to apply for a certificate of visa eligibility or prepare the documents you need for a status change. Wanting to hire a foreigner is not enough; they have to be willing to carry the administrative load. So asking directly in the first interview — have you hired a foreign employee and handled the visa process before — tells you more than reading ten postings.
Requirements and document lists for each status of stay are on HiKorea (hikorea.go.kr). If anything about the contract or pay terms is unclear, the Ministry of Employment and Labour counselling centre on 1350 handles enquiries and offers support in several languages.