The ratio of newly hired regular employees at South Korea's public institutions fell sharply in the first quarter amid a jump in the number of indefinite-term contract workers, data showed Monday.

According to the data from corporate tracker CEO Score and state portal All Public Information in One, 136 public firms and agencies with a workforce of 500 or more hired a combined 7,901 new employees in the January-March period.

Of the total, slightly over 73 percent, or 5,778, were regular workers, while the remainder were indefinite-term contract workers or those who are hired to contracts without fixed terms.

The portion of regular workers to all new hires was down sharply from 93.3 percent for all of 2017 and 89.8 percent for 2016.

Analysts said public institutions appear to have hired indefinite-term contract workers in the first term instead of regulars to go in line with the government's policy of "zero" nonregular workers in the public sector. 

"Public institutions probably increased hiring of indefinite-term contract workers as they might find it difficult to employ a large number of regular employees," said Choo Kwang-ho, a researcher at the Korea Economic Research Institute. "It is hard to say that the quality of jobs at the public sector worsened in the first quarter."

Watchers said the country's state companies and other public institutions may jack up their employment of new workers for all of this year in light of the first-quarter tally, which accounted for 37.4 percent of their new hirings of 21,134 last year.

The Moon Jae-in government has pledged to remove all nonregular jobs in the public sector during his five-year term as part of his signature job creation campaign. He has also promised to create 810,000 new quality jobs in the public sector over the next five years. (Yonhap)