Japanese Companies Joining War for Global Talent (Part 1)

Osaka – Sunday, December 4, 2011




As explained in the previous articles How Japanese Companies Started Acquiring and Retaining Global Talent and Japanese Companies Are Changing Global Talent Development Strategy, globalization of their human to globalize their organization and business is now the focus of the Japanese companies to compete and survive in today’s global economy. That is to say they have entered the War for Global Talent with their competitors of non-Japanese global companies.



There have been online and offline articles in variety of media about this topic lately and having read them the author realized that there are 4 main things the Japanese companies are focusing on, which she would like to briefly introduce in this article.



1. Acquire Non-Japanese New Graduates



Recruiting non-Japanese employees used to be only done locally; i.e. local employees used to be hired, assigned and developed all locally and they were mostly assigned to local positions.



However, Japanese companies started to realize that they need to acquire talent from around the globe. And because recruiting mid-careers is still not so popular in Japan, they have started to recruit non-Japanese new graduates.



1) Recruit Non-Japanese Who Have Studied in Universities in Japan



This is the first attempt by the Japanese companies because non-Japanese students who have been studying in universities in Japan would be fluent in Japanese and are used to Japanese culture. This is extremely important for Japanese companies because one of the requirements that most Japanese companies present in recruiting non-Japanese new graduates is proficiency in Japanese.



This was the case of an American colleague of the author of her previous employer and the case of her colleagues in her current site. They are both very fluent in Japanese, especially the latter, who has married to a Japanese wife and has the visa with which he can to live in Japan forever.



2) Recruit Non-Japanese Who Have Studied in Universities Outside Japan



This option is quite new for Japanese companies. The new graduates who are recruited are mostly Chinese university students from prestigious universities in China.



For example, Nikkei, Japan’s leading newspaper specialized in business and economy, reported on December 3 that a Japanese leading recruiting company called Recruit planned and hosted events in Beijing and Shanghai in November. 42 Japanese companies including NTT, Kyocera, Kao and Mitsubishi Corporation participated in the event.



They interviewed university students who are to graduate from top class universities such as Tshinghua University in summer of 2012. They were successful in meeting and interviewing as many as 1,000 students who were fluent in Japanese as well as English. Such students are interested in working for Japanese companies because they want to see whether their competencies and skills are competitive outside their country. Approximately 150 students were offered the job.



The reason for Japanese companies now proactively recruiting Chinese new graduates is the fact that they would be able to hire globally competitive Chinese students, when China is an important market in their global business strategy. This attributes to the fact that there are as many as 7 million students in China in a year group, which is 10 times as many as in Japan.



Chinese students who attend such an event are in general more fluent in English than Japanese students, and can speak Japanese as well.



Also according to Mr. Obata, who had started his career in the company Recruit and has recently been engaged in business of recruiting Chinese university new graduates in China, Chinese university students are in general also more conscious than Japanese students in improving their competitiveness in the global labour market.



The company Recruit commented that majority of the 42 companies are expecting to hire students who could be potential candidates to fill key management positions in the future.



2. Assign Non-Japanese to Key Management Positions Throughout the Group Company



Most employees working in Global HQ in Japan have been Japanese and the top and/or senior management of the worldwide local sites have been Japanese expatriates from the Japan HQ; however, that will also change gradually.



1) Diversify Employees Working in Global HQ in Japan



According to Nikkei, Aeon, the leading retailer in Japan, has set a target of making half of their employees working in Global HQ in Japan non-Japanese by 2020.



This is why they only did seminar for recruiting new graduates only once in Japan this year and they spent all remaining resources to doing seminars abroad to recruit non-Japanese students. In fact, 400 students out of 2,000 who will join them in April 2012 are non-Japanese students who are to graduate from universities abroad.



2) Localize and/or Diversify Local Management



This had started in such companies as Panasonic around 2005 and according to Nikkei, Aeon and Hitachi also started.



This is to allocate optimum human resource to key management positions of worldwide local sites, breaking the “glass ceiling”. This very often is assigning high-performing local employees to such positions who better understand all the circumstances of the country thus they would have better chance of managing the site and the employees compared to Japanese expatriates from the Global HQ.



For this reason, Aeon assigned a Malaysian female who had been working with them throughout her career as the top management of their Malaysia site this June.



Hitachi started to review their human resources of senior management positions of their worldwide sites this year, with the objective of achieving optimum allocation of their human resources based on their HRM system around the globe, especially in emerging markets.



3. Integrate Worldwide Human Resource DB and Evaluation System



Global companies such as IBM and P&G have been going through globalization since 1990s to establish a system in which information of high-performing worldwide employees are shared so that they can allocate with optimization employees to key management positions around the globe. Senior management of the group company of global companies is composed of diverse talent, such as Nestle, whose senior management is composed from people from 9 different nationalities.



Such HR system inevitable to attract and retain best talent from around the globe had not been established in Japanese companies; however, a few innovative Japanese companies started to realize the necessity of such system.



According to Nikkei, Hitachi integrated information of their 370,000 group-wide human resources in their DB and grades of worldwide line managers earlier this year. This is to select optimum human resources from worldwide for key positions and projects in order to compete with their global counterparts.



Fuji Xerox also has a plan of establishing a similar human resource DB with the very same objective, according to Rosei Jiho, a Japanese HRM magazine. They are fully aware that they need to integrate HR system which is currently different from country to country to develop a common platform throughout the group, especially evaluation and rewards system.



4. Provide Ttraining and International Assignments



This has been the primary ways of developing global talents and similarly to their global counterparts, Japanese companies have been improving and evolving their global talent development.



The author would like to introduce some of the examples in the upcoming article.





References:-



Nikkei’s article on p1 issued on December 3, 2011, about leveraging human resources by Japanese companies (in Japanese)



“Global Talent Development”, featured article of Vol. 3808 of Rosei Jiho issued on October 28, 2011, p10-p73 (in Japanese)

https://www.rosei.jp/readers



Online articles about recent recruiting trends in China and Japan by Japanese companies written by Mr. Shigekazu Obata (in Japanese)

http://diamond.jp/category/s-syukatsurepo





Resources:-

Japanese companies have been far behind in acquiring, developing, retaining and allocating with optimization global talent but they have realized that globalization of their business and organization is critical to compete and survive in the today’s global economy and that they would need to join War for Global Talent. Thus they have in earnest started recruiting non-Japanese new graduates from around the globe, localizing and diversifying people assigned to key worldwide management positions, and integrate group-wide human resource information, in addition to improving training and International Assignments.