The start of the job search

Depending on how you judge the situation you could say that I started my job search in Japan in February of this year. It was in February that I asked my supervising professor 指導教官 about looking for a job in Japan. He told me that February was a bit early and rather than looking for a job right now that I should concentrate on my thesis. I chose to put off my job search for the time being, concentrate on my graduation thesis and then to pick back up on the job search in early summer. My first mistake!

When May finally came around I began looking at the websites for different financial firms. Almost all of the firms, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, etc., were gaishikei 外資系 which is the Japanese word for a foreign company operating in Japan. To most Japanese, gaishikei carry a very modern and exotic image, one that is very different than that of Japanese companies which are notorious overtime 残業(zangyou) and relatively low wages. In a basic sense, working at a gaishikei is one way for the typical Japanese to escape the image of being your average salaryman サラリーマン. For me, the gaishikei would be the ultimate job! Better salary and working conditions than most Japanese companies and I could make use my most valuable skill, English! Also, since my Japanese wasn't perfect I figured that it would be best for me to work in an office environment where I would be treated as an equal rather than in an environment where all of my coworkers would be arguing over who has to go and explain to the foreigner what the details of his job are.

As I began looking at the websites of gaishikei that I had planned to target I noticed one striking similarity. None of them were hiring anymore! Most had stopped accepting applications around March and April. I was ready to kill my supervising professor! I just kept thinking to myself, "No wonder he isn't working in the private sector. He became a teacher because he couldn't hack it in the real world and I was actually stupid enough to ask him of all people for advice". As things turned out, the job search for most Japanese begins a year and a half before they graduate. So, if they graduate in March of 2008, they will begin looking for a job in October of 2006. Why Japanese start looking so early still baffles me but it is the system here so we might as well adjust to it. And if you do not start looking early as well you will find that positions at all of the good companies have all passed you by. In my case, in May 2007 I started applying for positions to start work in April 2008 and about 65 to 70% of companies had already stopped accepting applications. Unlike back home where you can start searching 1 or 2 months before you graduate, in Japan you have to start 1 or 2 years.

It was at that point that I started searching the internet a little more. Before, I was searching using terms like "外資系","外国の企業","金融系" but the results were not relevant at all. Eventually, I figured out that I was using the wrong words and decided to use words like 就職、就活、仕事　探し. This dramatically improved the quality of the results but still the results really were not tailored to my needs. However, I was able to find two sites that basically provided me with all of the 会社説明会 and interviews I attended. Those two sites were rikunabi and nikkeinabi.

Between Rikunabi and Nikkeinabi I personally prefer rikunabi. Like most job sites both allow you to upload your entire resume and search through businesses. Rikunabi also has sites for new graduates where thousands of companies post information about their 説明会 and if you are interested you can share your resume with those companies by sending them an entry エントリー or you can make an appointment to participate in one of their 会社説明会. Note: For new graduates you must first participate in the 会社説明会 before you can even be considered. I will talk more about 会社説明会 and my experiences with them in other articles but for now you should know that in order to even be considered as a possible candidate for entering a Japanese company as 新卒採用 you will need to attend the kaishasetsumeikai.

Other than having a larger database of companies than nikkeinabi, the other thing that I liked about rikunabi was that when I signed up to attend the kaishasetsumeikai for a company it automatically saved my appointment in my schedule calendar and linked back to the company so that I could easily go back and see the company I had scheduled. This was a major convenience for me as I was going to Tokyo everyday, sometimes attending two setsumeikai a day and I often forgot the details of companies I was applying to. In the early part of my job search I was strictly playing the numbers and there were a few experiences that I didn't even know the name of the company whose setsumeikai I was attending until 30 minutes beforehand. In those situations I used my keitai to login to rikunabi where I checked the schedule and then followed the link to the company's page where I could read up about them a bit so that I wouldn't be walking into an IT company expecting Finance.

Another useful feature about rikunabi was the ability to search for kaisha setsumeikai by date. At first I didn't realize this benri little feature and I spent hours upon hours trying to match up my free times with companies I was interested in. After finding out about this feature I just searched my schedule for free time and then searched rikunabi for setsumeikai being held on the same date. Usually, anywhere from 200 to 400 results would come back and then I filtered those results for companies I was interested in. Looking back, I wish I would have filtered those businesses a little more as most were not interested at all in hiring a foreigner and many had never in their company's history hired a foreigner. If I could go back now I would have filtered those results down a bit with terms like 留学生採用、留学生も採用、留学生、外国人、国際的な, etc. However, I mainly just looked at the details of the job 仕事内容, the type of skills they were looking for, salary and benefits 給料と賞与 and other details.

After several days I had over 30 meetings in Tokyo planned. I was actually planned to go to Tokyo everyday of every week except a few Sundays. The number of companies looking for applicants were getting slim and I had to make the most of the time I had.

To be continued...