Daijob was founded 17 years ago as a medium for foreign-affiliated firms in Japan to contact jobseekers directly in English. We have since become specialised in providing bilingual professionals with global experience. We boast 470,000 registrations since 1998, making us the largest jobsite for bilinguals in Japan. We allow HR managers to scout potential candidates by sending messages directly to jobseekers through our platform.
Our main service consists of a package including posting on our website—which features interfaces in Japanese, English and Chinese—and scout mails. In total we offer five services to help firms meet their recruiting requirements. These include three job sites—for bilinguals, for foreign students in Japan and for those looking to work outside their home country—a bilingual recruitment consultancy and a career fair.
How do you expect the job market to change?
The Japanese economy is expected to grow at a slower rate, and the working population is expected to decline rapidly after 2022. Meanwhile, emerging nations with a large working-age population are seeking to quickly increase education standards in line with their market expansion.
In Japan, firms are seeking to generate a larger proportion of their revenues from overseas, and there will be an increasing need to rely on non-Japanese workers. In addition, there will be an increase in demand for talented people, not only from Japanese firms, but also firms in other developed nations. Those who speak English, and have IT skills in particular, should have few obstacles in finding work in various countries, or even joining a firm and working remotely.
Daijob Global Recruiting has traditionally only focused on introducing bilingual talent to Japanese and foreign-affiliated firms in Japan. However, in January 2014, we launched Working Abroad, a site designed to introduce bilingual people in Japan to Japanese-speaking jobs abroad. Even without extensive marketing efforts, 13.4% of users within our database—as of the end of May 2015—have found us through Working Abroad: a very surprising statistic. We therefore have proof of a market for people seeking to work outside Japan, despite Japanese people tending not to go abroad for study or work.
The most difficult challenge facing globalisation in Japan has been the population’s lack of English-language ability, despite many children learning English from a young age. It is clear that Japan is moving in the right direction to improve this situation. Some firms in Japan are also making English their primary language for internal communications, meaning that the ground is also being prepared to allow non-Japanese to enter Japan for work.
What services do you plan to develop?
In order to align ourselves with how the job market will develop, we plan to make Working Abroad more global. For example, a Singapore IT firm that currently uses Working Abroad may only be able to hire Japanese people. We would like to help them hire people with Japanese-language ability from other countries, too, such as the United States, China or India.
On this completely new cross-border platform, posting jobs and hiring will be free, although this will apply only to jobs based outside Japan. Any Japanese or foreign-affiliated firms with a branch or headquarters overseas should feel free to enquire about a free posting. We can provide free posting now on our existing Japanese version of Working Abroad.
