GOYANG — Goyang, a city in Gyeonggi Province seeking to transform from a residential suburb into an economically self-sufficient city, is overhauling its corporate recruitment strategy around a hands-on, sales-style outreach approach.
The city held a forum on corporate recruitment strategy on the 15th at the Smart City Center of the Seongsa Creative Innovation Campus, where it unveiled a draft master plan detailing specific incentives and close-support measures. About 20 business representatives and economic and investment experts attended.
Despite strong access to the Seoul metropolitan area and favorable living conditions, the city has faced constraints from overlapping regulations and competition among local governments for corporate investment. To address those limits, officials recently visited more than 30 companies and institutions to gather complaints directly from the field. They found that beyond land costs, firms weigh employee commuting, securing key personnel and access to startup financing as central criteria in choosing a location, and reflected those findings in the draft plan.
Under its core strategy, the city will identify about 100 target companies with high investment potential in key strategic industries — medical devices and health care, K-culture and broadcast video, and smart mobility. It will then designate priority companies from that pool and build a tailored outreach network that provides close support through the entire process, from proposing sites to signing contracts and moving in.
The city also plans to significantly expand practical support measures, including tailored financial and fiscal support linkages to ease companies' initial funding burdens, a commuting and settlement package for employees aimed at attracting top talent, and a one-stop dedicated project manager system to speed up complex permit and approval procedures.
Goyang said it will quickly incorporate opinions raised at the forum to refine its recruitment strategy and will begin intensive promotion and one-on-one follow-up consultations with individual companies in line with the land sales schedule for Goyang Ilsan Tech Valley, which starts in earnest in November.
"Attracting companies is not a desk exercise but a process of finding the answers the field genuinely wants," Goyang Mayor Min Kyung-sun said. "Building on differentiated support measures that reflect voices from the field, we will prove our ability to execute so that Ilsan Tech Valley becomes the top choice for advanced technology companies."