There are plenty of major Japanese companies that can offer decent pay, benefits and job security. But when it comes to attracting top young international talent, Japanese employers are aware that the tide is against them. This is especially true in the high-tech world where Japan is no longer considered to be on the cutting edge of cool.
“The appeal of working for a Japanese company is diminishing,” said Ryuichi Yoshinaga, president of Pasona Tech , an employment agency that specializes in information technology personnel and conducts job fairs in Beijing, Shanghai and Dalian, China, for Japanese recruiters.
The new reality — in which China’s economy is now larger than Japan’s — has changed perspectives, he said. “Leading Japanese technology firms are struggling” to recruit young workers there, Mr. Yoshinaga said.
“It used to be that Japanese companies were next to Western firms in popularity,” he added. As for young Chinese graduates, “many of them believe they might have a good career perspective by staying put in China.”
Politics has also gotten in the way of cross-border hiring. As tensions grew over disputed islands in the East China Sea, Japanese employers had to cut back on recruiting activities this year, especially in Beijing.
“Chinese universities are asking us not to hold recruiting events on campus for safety reasons,” said a spokeswoman at a Japanese company who asked to remain anonymous because of the political sensitivity of the issue. In northeastern cities like Dalian, which traditionally has friendlier attitudes toward Japan, hiring can be done, but only discreetly. “Over all, recruitment activities by Japanese firms might have fallen by more than half this year in China,” she said.
Some Japanese recruiters say that the risks in China have prompted them to do more recruiting in Southeast Asian nations like the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
Foreign job seekers face several hurdles in Japan. They might be expected to master the Japanese language and go through the arduous process of learning the Japanese way of professional life. A globe-trotting, job-hopping young American, Chinese or European new graduate might not want to invest the time and energy. Plus, traditional employers may not give new recruits much responsibility. The mentality in Japan is that new workers can learn the ropes over time, and young hires are often not given jobs that match their specializations.
But securing high-caliber talent from abroad is crucial for Japanese companies, especially since their home market is shrinking. They need to reach overseas, human resources managers at Japanese corporations say.
Relatively young I.T. firms are now rethinking the conventional Japanese way of recruiting and training, trying new tactics instead: They are actively seeking employees overseas, using more English in the workplace, giving young workers more responsibility, and even acquiring top talent through takeovers and mergers with foreign companies.
Rakuten , which operates Japan’s largest Internet shopping mall, has been expanding its geographic reach overseas by buying online retail companies like Buy.com from the United States, Tradoria from Germany and PriceMinister from France. It has also decided to embrace English as its official language to foster better communication among its global units and increase organizational visibility for non-Japanese workers.
“If you don’t have full-scale policy regarding language, non-Japanese workers might feel excluded,” said Masayoshi Higuchi, vice department manager of global human resources at Rakuten. Mr. Higuchi said that in the last two years, when their new language policy was announced and instituted in a phased manner, there was an increase in the number of international employees.
This year, 70 out of 100 new hires in the engineering department were non-Japanese. In 2010, about 4 percent of the staff members at the parent company were foreign; that doubled to 8 percent in 2012.
“The language policy has had a significant impact” on our ability to conduct recruitment, he said.
Avinash Varma, 23, a graduate of the University of Mumbai, is one such promising employee who joined Rakuten in 2011.
He felt that Rakuten would be a good place to develop his career as a software engineer because, “I can obtain domain knowledge specifically of Internet shopping,” he said.
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