South Korea's jobless numbers in the third quarter surpassed the 1 million mark for the first time since the country struggled with the fallout of the Asian financial crisis, government data showed Sunday.
  
Numbers released by Statistics Korea showed the average monthly unemployment stood slightly over 1.06 million in the July-September period, up a sharp 102,000 from a year earlier.
  
This is the highest reading for the third quarter after the 1.33 million tallied in 1999, when the country was still reeling from the worldwide economic meltdown two years earlier.
  
The statistical agency said that there have been other times that the quarterly jobless figure exceeded 1 million, but these occurred in the first or second quarters, which are the hiring seasons in Asia's fourth-largest economy, with more people looking for employment.

Usually jobseekers fall off beginning in the third quarter, causing unemployment numbers to decline as well.

A rise in joblessness indicates an increase in the number of people unable to find work relative to those joining the labor force, and shows how hard it is to land a job.
  
It said the jobless rate for the third quarter stood at 3.8 percent, up 0.4 percentage point vis-a-vis the year before. The increase is the sharpest in 15 quarters when it moved up 0.4 percentage point in the fourth quarter of 2014.
  
In addition, the employment rate for the country in the three months that ended Sept. 30 stood at 61.1 percent, down 0.3 percentage point on-year, and again the sharpest decline since the 0.5 percentage point fall reported in the first quarter of 2010.
  
The latest numbers represents the second quarter in a row that employment figures have headed south.
  
Market watchers said disappointing quarterly numbers are impacting overall hiring, with newly hired people in 2018 hitting just 101,000 as of last month, the poorest showing since some 108,000 jobs were lost in 2009.