How Japanese Companies Started Acquiring and Retaining Global Talent

Osaka – Saturday, 15 January, 2011




As a follow-up of the previous article Japanese Companies Join War for Global Talent, this article introduces a case of Ricoh http://www.ricoh.com/ a typical Japanese company, of acquiring, developing and retaining global talent, which was introduced in a recent Japanese HRM (human resource management) publication http://www.busi-pub.com/.



1. How are sales and employees of the group company geographically diversified?



56% of worldwide sales come from overseas (outside Japan) and 62% of worldwide employees are located overseas. Geographical diversification of sales and employees are balanced for a Japanese company.



Sales by region

Region / Sales (billion yen) / %

Japan / 876.5 / 43.5

Americas / 557.6 / 27.7

Europe / 458.5 / 22.7

Others / 123.4 / 6.1

Total / 2016.0 /100.0



Employees

Region / Number of employee / %

Japan / 41,118 / 37.9

Americas / 35,000 / 32.3

Europe / 17,239 / 15.9

China / 10,143 / 9.3

Asia-Pacific / 5,025 / 4.6

Total / 108,525 / 100.0



2. Has the company been hiring non-Japanese in Japan already?



Yes and at present there are 84 non-Japanese employees (64 regular, 20 non-regular). Their country of origin are varied including China, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, France, Russia, the U.S., Kenya, the U.K., Peru, and Malaysia. 80% of new graduate hiring of non-Japanese are engineers.



The reason for non-Japanese hiring is because the company is to increase the percentage of overseas sales, which means they would need more global talent.



300-350 people are hired annually and their target is to hire 30 of them who are non-Japanese, which they have been achieving. However, this does not mean they have been acquiring global talent globally because the process and requirements are exactly the same as Japanese graduates. This means that Japanese fluency would be one of the requirements, which is a big hurdle for majority of non-Japanese.



3. How is the company to change their global talent hiring?



They are to change the target and process of the recruiting. Non-Japanese living in Japan have been their target and therefore their recruiting has been all done in Japan but they will also target people living outside Japan.



The have recently tried something new, which is joining a group recruiting event held in Boston, the U.S. It turned out to be that 90% of the participants of the event are Japanese people studying in the U.S.



They knew there are many non-American participants for the event but they were shocked to know the reality that few non-Japanese students are interested in their company. Thus their challenge is how to attract attention and interest of non-Japanese people and how to navigate them to apply for their positions. Of course, engaging and retaining them would be the challenge as well.



4. What is the impact of increase in non-Japanese employees on workplace?



It is true that the ratio of non-Japanese employees in the company (non-consolidated, some 13,000) is still very low and not every departments has non-Japanese employees thus it takes time for the total company to globalize but there has been some positive impacts.



A Chinese new graduate was assigned as a first non-Japanese in a HR department and he has contributed to changing culture of the department. He casually teaches English and Chinese to members of the department who enjoy learning, which also facilitated communication. An American moved into another department, which encouraged members of the department to learn English.



5. What is the challenges the company is facing or to face in recruiting non-Japanese from outside Japan?



1) Appropriate hard and soft factors to admit non-Japanese employees in the workplace






(1) Hard factors



This is mainly about language issue, making internal infrastructure/DB (data base) and documents bilingual (Japanese and English). The change in the company’s hiring of global talent to be strategically assigned in Japan means they would hire people who cannot understand Japanese but since they have hired people who are fluent in Japanese they did not need to make internal infrastructure and documents bilingual.



(2) Soft factors



This is all about people and culture of the workplace in Japan. It is about people with global and D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) mindset and actions. It is about the D&I culture. This deserves much discussion and a book can be written on this topic so the author would like to refrain from discussion this issue in this article.



2) International job rotation



As explained in the previous article Japanese Companies Join War for Global Talent there were not truly international job rotation in Japanese companies but with acquiring, developing, retaining and engaging global talent and leverage them international rotation would be necessary for globalization of the company and its people. This is one important way of developing employees with global and D&I mindset and cultivating an organization of global, D&I culture.





In one of the upcoming article the author would like explain and discuss how Japanese companies are trying to globalize their Japanese employees.





References:-

Global HR Development of Ricoh (a special article) 2011 January edition of http://www.busi-pub.com/ (in Japanese)