Sourcing in Japan

[Padmanabh Dabir]

Hi,

 

Is there anyone who has experience in sourcing candidates from Japan?

I have been doing recruitment for Japan from last few months but finding lots of challanges to get the right candidates through portal & through Networking sights.

 

Problem what I face : Limited pool of candidates available on Networking Sights.

Most of the Japanese people dont use any online tool from where we can get right candidates.

 

If somebody having experience to work for Japan market kindly Share there experience & if you know any solution please let me know.

 

regards,

Paddy

[Dave Galley]

I have absolutely no experience with recruiting in Japan, but from some initial web searches turned up--

 

1) Mixi is a big social networking site in Japan (perhaps their biggest).

2) This is a recurring questioon on Quora, but I can't look up the answers because there is an outage right now, it sems.

3) I found the following article on SNS (social networking sites) in Japan -- http://megoyanagi.thoseinmedia.com/2011/01/15/vol-48-%e2%80%93-2011....

4) Seems like Twitter is big.

 

In general, recruiting in a new / foreign market has to do quite a bit with learning the local culture - how people look for jobs, how (if) they broadcast their interest in being approached about new jobs, etc. Once you know these things, you can best position yourself.

[Tom Furlong]

I was a recruiter in Tokyo for a year (2007-2008 time frame)- to say that almost all candidates are less than passive is an understatement. Most use social networks for socializing (i.e. Facebook) so that may be a start. The concept of putting ones background out for open review does not exist in Japan; the sense of company loyalty is too strong to all but the most progressive worker. I just ran a quick Boolean search to estimate the number of LinkedIn profiles in Japan and came up with just under 80,000 profiles which is not many considering the size of the work force. (Glen Cathey at Boolean Black Belt recently had a challenge to estimate the number of worldwide LinkedIn profiles- I adopted several submitted methodologies for my quick search.)

The sourcing strategy that was worked best for me & my company was old fashioned calling the few candidates out there and getting names from them to contact, and then repeat. I wish I could be more positive but, without being physically in Japan, you may have great difficulty sourcing any candidates. Your challenge isn't the limited pool of candidates on networking sites- it is the limited pool of candidates in the society.

 

Tom

[Padmanabh Dabir]

Hi Tom,

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

Regards,

Padmanabh

Tom Furlong said:

I was a recruiter in Tokyo for a year (2007-2008 time frame)- to say that almost all candidates are less than passive is an understatement. Most use social networks for socializing (i.e. Facebook) so that may be a start. The concept of putting ones background out for open review does not exist in Japan; the sense of company loyalty is too strong to all but the most progressive worker. I just ran a quick Boolean search to estimate the number of LinkedIn profiles in Japan and came up with just under 80,000 profiles which is not many considering the size of the work force. (Glen Cathey at Boolean Black Belt recently had a challenge to estimate the number of worldwide LinkedIn profiles- I adopted several submitted methodologies for my quick search.)

The sourcing strategy that was worked best for me & my company was old fashioned calling the few candidates out there and getting names from them to contact, and then repeat. I wish I could be more positive but, without being physically in Japan, you may have great difficulty sourcing any candidates. Your challenge isn't the limited pool of candidates on networking sites- it is the limited pool of candidates in the society.

 

Tom