How To Get a Job in Japan. Or Anywhere. | Hacker News Reader

How To Get a Job in Japan. Or Anywhere.

makeleaps.com

136 pointspo30 comments

Well, there's also the issue of working in a foreign country legally. I wish it weren't so much of a hurdle.

I've worked in three different countries, not much by any measure, but enough to gain some insights:

1. Your social value goes down the drain. Saying "I have a very popular design blog in Spanish" means nothing to the English speaking market. Saying you studied in a top tier university in Mexico is the same as saying you have a high school diploma.

2. The relevance of your previous work is undermined. Unless they're huge international countries, they've probably never even heard about them.

3. It's difficult to convey quality if most of the pieces in your portfolio are in a different language than that your potential employer. Copy plays a big part in the perception of quality.

Until I moved to Canada I had never even had to look for work. I had some difficulty finding a good match that was willing to try me out. Fortunately I got a small freelance project with a great company and we hit it off from there.

If I had to do it again, I'd start by building something small but useful for the city I'm moving to (say, a webapp to find open beer stores). This helps you generate local value in the language of the ecosystem you are trying get into and connects you with local devs and designers.

Not nitpicking here: your social value does not disappear, your social status does. Smart employers will recognise your potential, and probably try to exploit your situation; don't let them get away with it, as long as your language skills are good your value to any business is intact.

I say this as an economic migrant who went through a few years of "adjustment".

I'm on the opposite side of the coin. I'd love to get a job outside the US, where I live, but I've got no idea how to handle visa issues. How did you handle them?

My other barrier is language. I imagine I could work in England/Ireland, or even Australia, but are there countries where an English-speaker could find work?

I'm a Dual Citizen of Mexico and Canada. Canada has agreements with 25 countries that allow you to work for a year in a foreign country for one year if you are under 35:

http://www.international.gc.ca/iyp-pij/agreements_in-accords...

I'm not sure about US agreements with other countries, but I know that if you have a university degree of the following list http://www.u-s-a-immigration.com/INS/NAFTA_Professional_Job_... then you are allowed to work in Mexico and Canada.

As for only knowing English, well, it depends on the industry. Most companies want to tackle the US market and they would see your native English as a very good asset. But you would need to bring something else to the table (good chops or connections, basically).

Talk to the local embassy of the country you want to move to. In Europe, most countries give US citizens preferential treatment; chances are that they'll easily allow you to stay, but you might have to renew the visa every year or every X years, at least until you apply for citizenship / marry a local.

You can work in English in any Scandinavian country, in Germany, in India, in South-Africa. You'd almost certainly struggle in Italy, France or Spain.

And right now we’re looking for stability. We had a recent employee leave Japan immediately after the earthquake

I guess the employee was looking for the same thing.

Good post, but unfortunately getting hired in Japan involves a lot more aspects than how you answer/ask questions. For one thing, the process of hiring "fresh college graduates" in Japan is a particular beast of its own, rightly deserving books written about it. As a recent hire here, for the past year I have gone through multiple gauntlets of psych exams, hand-written/online tests, group discussions, test cases, interviews, etc. Here's my tips to increase your chances of getting hired:

1. An introduction/recommendation by someone from the inside trumps everything. Before even handing in a application, get to know a person from the company that you are going to apply into, preferably someone in a high position. If you went to a Japanese university (especially a high-ranking one), a professor's recommendation is basically gold. At the very least, any employee's introduction (even non-management) will get you past the HR filter and most likely give you the first interview directly with an engineer, where your various social faux pas will be forgiven.

2. Engineering skills aside, employers are concerned about 2 things: a. How good is your Japanese? b. How long are you going to stay in Japan? How you answer b. is up to your judgment, but you have to be straight-up honest with a. If you ever had any doubts about your Japanese (as I have), just be up-front about it. No sense in bullshitting, as they will figure you out by the first interview anyways. On the other hand, if you did a lot of prep, you will surprise them and exceed their expectations.

A lot of people forget that hunting for a job is an attempt for 2 entities to fulfill needs. The employee wants money and (probably) a job they can care about. The employer wants some specific work done, probably in a specific way.

Working-while-in-college jobs do not prepare us for job interviews properly because shotgun resumes work perfectly fine there. The company only cares that there is a human doing the work (which any human can do) and the employee only cares that they get a paycheck.

When they move on, the employee is doubly unprepared. They don't understand that an interview is 2-sided, and they don't have any experience dealing with the situation, whereas the company does have both those things.

I'm guessing this tends to depend a lot on the kind of working-while-in-college jobs you do. A lot of comp sci majors work on their exact field of work while in college. This gives them some pretty hefty experience points by the time they look for a "real" job.

Very good article. The candidate response in that interview is indeed brilliant, but in my experience it's very hard to come up with something like this on-the-fly, without sounding like you're just rephrasing the other guy. Maybe that's why I don't work in sales ;)

For engineers, I think the key is not to try to "sell yourself" or even talk much about yourself at all. Instead, just start digging right into the details. Act like they've already given you the job and you're trying to get oriented so you can start. If you're smart and qualified, it will come through very clearly if you take this approach. It focuses the interview on tangible details and your problem solving abilities instead of amorphous qualifications and experience that anyone can bs (and which interviewers are naturally suspicious of). Also, if you are being interviewed by a less technical person, asking detail-oriented questions (which they often won't have thought about themselves) puts you in the driver's seat and gives you that 'tech guru' halo that business guy types are secretly in awe of. Note I'm not saying you should speak in techno-babble. Use plain speech, but focus on details.

You'd be surprised how few people notice you're doing it.

While I think the advice is applicable, I'm not sure how it really differentiates from the shotgun resume approach. Either method involves making first contact, and nothing starts without some form of communication with the company you're interested in. The issue isn't throwing resumes at every company with no plan, the issue is actually getting to speak to someone at the company who knows what they're hiring for and is willing to talk to you about it. I don't think this article covers that first step (and nothing can be done without that initial contact).

I spent 2009-2010 working at a traditional Japanese company in Japan, and it's interesting b/c the vast vast majority of Japanese students looking for their first job will use the shotgun method (this is particularly the case for Humanities students, not so much for science/engineering students though).

It's pretty typical for college students to apply to anywhere from 50-200 companies during their 3rd-4th years of college. The situation is so bad that students compete for spots in "explanation sessions" at their universities by using smartphones to snap up openings as soon as signups start (exacerbated by the fact that many companies have cut new student hiring by anywhere from 30%-50% following the earthquake and power supply issues).

I believe the advice of this author applies primarily to people applying to foreign subsidiaries operating in Japan (the so called "Gaishi-kei" companies). His advice isn't really relevant for applying to Domestic Japanese companies (what anditto writes is pretty accurate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2769466)

I think however, that if you really want to get the job, following the AskTheHeadhunter strategy is probably best: 1. Actively choose the companies you want to work for. It doesn't matter if they have an open position or not. 2. Research the company, discover the people you need to know, get to know them, find out what the key issues are. 3. Be able to do the job they need done 4. Be able to do the job the way they need it done 5. Be able to do the job profitably 6. And do the job to get the job. Anything else is interview skills, which have little value except to HR jobs.

And gaijinpot is probably not the best place for technologists. Nor any job board that doesn't focus on your specific skills sets. Headhunters, just outsource the above steps for you. Except they can't do the job for you.

Intriguing title for what turned out to be usual generic career advice platitudes

Thanks for taking the time to comment. You didn't pick up any new information at all?

If not, do you have any tips or ideas to share about the interview process?

Where do you find the 'personalized information' about hiring managers etc? You mention it's important to customize your approach, but don't give any hints about where we're supposed to get that kind of information. Or do employees at the companies you deal with put the entirety of their company's structure into Linkedin or something?

This is done by paying very careful attention to the person who is interviewing you.

Are they very formal? Friendly? Upbeat? Precise?

For example, if they're wearing a suit and tie in an extremely hot summer, and they're very well groomed and are they asking direct questions about your background with narrow eyes and folded arms, this gives me a tremendous amount of information about the kind of person they are, where their concerns may lie, and how to provide the kind of answers in a format they'll prefer and appreciate.

By training yourself to be aware of the person on the other side of the table, it's remarkable the detail and level of personalised information you can pick up. Of course, this is a skill and takes time to develop.

Ha! But that depends on getting an interview! The article says that the shotgun method doesn't work and that the solution is to personalize your messages. You can't personalize based on the interview that you don't have because you didn't personalize!

Article: "If the job seeker doesn’t take time to understand the company, and personalise their written and spoken message to the hiring manager at that company, it’s easy to see why the business might pass them over for candidates that offer more personalized communication."

Thats true. The article actually covers both.

Under "How do I personalise my message?", theres an example of customising your message on the fly in the interview.

In regards to actually applying for the job, there are 5 examples of customising your message to apply for the job.

The way I define the shotgun method, and why it's a flawed method, is that it's a simple process of copying and pasting your resume and cover letter with only the briefest of changes in the company name and the hiring manager's name (and sometimes people even forget to change these) - without any understanding or interest in the business itself, and the problems that it's trying to solve, both in general and with hiring you.

How do you get to the interview?

agreed, "don't do the shotgun method" is easier said when companies actually explain what they are looking for, instead of that what you get are increasingly generic job posts and don't even get me started on the headhunters scum. The hiring market process is broken and this article pretends to help you with basic sales advice.

I think Getting a Job is Sales says it all.

Even though some of the information in this article should be a "no-brainer", I felt it did a nice job of reinforcing useful attributes of an effective application. Furthermore, I thought his real-life interview examples were helpful. I will definitely keep the pointers of this article in mind during my post-grad job hunt.

You can, of course, look at an interview as an opportunity to "sell" yourself, but I think in the long run it's a much better idea to look for companies that are willing to engage in a two-sided dialog, rather than expecting a sales pitch.

Addendum to the Bonus Japan Section: Amazon's mobile web team is expanding in Tokyo.

Nice article, your about page link in the footer appears to be a 404 though.

[edit to remove bug report]

I liked this "how to hire" post from last year: http://www.makeleaps.com/blog/en/2010/07/hiring-your-first-e...

Thanks guys - I think I've fixed both of these. I've been doing a lot of work on the site recently, so these fell through the cracks.

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