I believe a career in recruitment, whether that’s internal, agency, or otherwise, can be extremely fulfilling. Japan has one of the most interesting and unique recruitment markets in the world, and is full of opportunity for those who are both starting out in their career or have several years of work experience.

I’d like to share a bit about my experience as a recruiter in Tokyo and demystify some common misconceptions about the industry.

My Start in Recruiting

The first year was a huge learning curve. I was in the office in the mornings talking to prospective candidates on the phone and LinkedIn, and in the afternoons I’d be out to meet new clients (like Amazon/Spotify/Expedia/Facebook), but I was full of energy and high off the adrenaline. It was exciting meeting global tech companies and helping people find jobs there. Because I was motivated, and the people around me supportive, I didn’t mind staying until 9 or 10 pm some days.

I spent a four years there helping global tech companies and startups hire for the Japanese market.  Most of my clients spoke English, so I didn’t have to use much Japanese, although I had studied abroad for one year in Japan so I did use it occasionally in more casual settings. My boss was great. He was there to push me where necessary (get on the phone!), but at the same time gave me a lot of direction and autonomy to make my own decisions. Having a good boss that cares about your career is essential to your success in any company.

The first year I was doing really well, but I worked too hard and inevitably got burnt out. So I took a two week vacation and then came back with a more realistic schedule, prioritizing my life over work. I found that recruitment went in phases. The start of the quarter (it’s a cyclical business) would be very busy, but then would taper off. I would make sure to plan lots of trips and holidays towards the middle and later part of the quarter, and to manage my stress levels throughout. I found that I was able to shut off completely on weekends and still produce great results. I had found a good balance.

And then after the first year, something clicked. Once I had made a few successful placements, got the basic process of it all, and figured out my work life balance, it became even more rewarding! Of course there was a still a lot more to learn; I shifted my focus from “making money” to “continuous learning.” I was promoted to consultant, senior consultant and eventually made my way up to manager where I was responsible for a small team of four.

Five reasons I enjoyed recruitment

If I had to choose just five…

1. Autonomy. You are usually free to plan your week, apart from a couple of meetings you have to attend with your team. This means you could experiment. You’re your own boss in many ways. This was a double-edged sword, of course, because if you didn’t plan well then your results would suffer. Your success was in your hands. With great autonomy comes great responsibility!
2. Impact. You’re helping two groups of people here; companies to hire, and job candidates to find jobs. The person you hire can literally go on to change the trajectory of the business, and the candidate you help can start a new life thanks to you. I remember when I had introduced the head of Amazon’s Audible (audiobook) business to launch in Japan — it was really motivating to see him start the business, and then I could use their service as a consumer, too!
3. Great connections. You’re meeting people every day, many of who will become your friends, future business partners, and part of your extended network. Even when you leave the recruitment industry, you can take this with you wherever you go.
4. Transferable skills. Sales, marketing, business development, writing, customer support, contract negotiation, relationship building, research, networking and so much more. Many recruiters start their own businesses. Others join companies like Google, Expedia, American Express, Amazon, and Facebook. While most of them continue to do recruitment (“internal” recruitment), some of them moved into a different function. A strong background in HR can set you up to be a CEO.
5. Salary. There’s a lot of money to be made in any sales job, depending on how hard/smart you can and are willing to work, as well as the salary structure of the company you’re at. The first year I doubled my salary. The second year I tripled it. And the third year I quadrupled it.

Why recruiters exist

Recruitment seeks to solve a fundamental problem — how do you hire and retain the best people? Let’s say that Apple wants to enter the Chinese market and setup a branch tomorrow. They need to find a country head to start it up. If it takes Apple 6 months to find that person, what is the opportunity cost of waiting? Well, the country head also has to hire a sales team, partner with distributors and get through legal hurdles. In reality it could take them a year before they start selling their iPhones.

If Apple would have found that hire in 4 months, or 1 month, instead of 6, they could have started selling millions of iPhones, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars. For every second they don’t have the person to do this job, they are losing out on a lot of money. This is the value you can add as recruiter, and this is exactly why companies are willing to pay so much money to recruitment agencies to find people. That’s the client side, and “client” here (Apple) refers to the company that is paying a recruitment company to hire for them.

On the other side, we have candidates. Candidate is just a synonym for job seeker. Why would someone looking for a job use a recruiter rather than just applying for the job directly? That’s simple. First of all, recruiters have specialized knowledge about the company, the job, and the interview process that you couldn’t get access to otherwise. They can manage the interview process as well as your expectations and the clients expectations. They know what skills it takes to actually get the job, and often times can put you directly in touch with the decision makers rather than just dealing with HR.

They know what the market trends are and they can tell you whether or not a company has a good or bad reputation, divulging information about what it’s really like to work there, not just what’s written online. A great recruiter can give you more objective advice about whether it’s actually a good career move based on what you want to do. Good recruiters will help you negotiate your salary and favorable job terms. They will be the difference between you getting the job versus sending your applications to the company job page and never getting a response from HR.

The business model

As an agency recruiter, a company (“client”) will pay you a fee for successfully hiring a candidate (the person looking for a job). You get paid by clients, not the candidates. A very important point to remember. The fee is calculated based on a percentage of the candidates yearly salary. For example, if Amazon hires an engineer with a salary of 8,000,000 yen, then the recruitment company will receive 35% of that yearly salary as your fee = 2,800,000 yen. Now, that doesn’t go into the individual recruiters bank account, but is rather added to your overall “target” for the quarter. Your actual salary will depend on the bonus and incentive system that your company has set up.

Two types of recruiters:

1. Internal recruiters, also known as “corporate” recruiters, work inside the employer’s organization and usually collect a paycheck (salary) from the employer who has the jobs open. Their office will typically be on the employer’s premises, and their email and phone will typically be part of the employer’s email and phone system.
2. External recruiters, also known as agency recruiters, do not receive a paycheck from the employer who has the open jobs. They work for someone else, a recruiting firm or agency, which issues their paychecks. Some, of course, work for themselves. None are on the payroll of the employer with the open jobs.

There are essentially two areas that all of your activities will be split into, and it should be help to think about it this way — the candidate side (job seeker) and the client side (company).  

The model looks something like this:

Source: Kforce

Daily activities

No day is the same in recruitment. That’s the fun part. The goal is to find the best hires for your clients, so most of your time is spent with that goal in mind. That entails everything from finding the candidates, helping them with interview preparation, negotiating contracts, exchanging feedback with clients, and influencing the hiring process.

You manage several clients, who have several job openings, and you could be helping anywhere from 10-20 people find jobs at any given time. You will spend a significant amount of time understanding the market, meeting candidates, meeting clients, interviewing, screening, negotiating, building relationships.

The candidate side includes but is not limited to the below activities:

• Scouting new candidates on LinkedIn and other job boards
• Meeting new candidates to discuss potential job opportunities
• Re-meeting previous candidates to discuss job opportunities
• Preparing candidates for interviews
• Scheduling interviews for candidates
• Negotiating offers and compensation on behalf of candidates

The client side includes but is not limited to the below activities:

• Finding new clients (business development calls, going to marketing events)
• Attending new client meetings
• Negotiating contracts and fees with clients
• Attending/catching up with existing clients (“account management”)
• Updating clients on the status of a search
• Scheduling interviews on behalf of candidates with the client company

Not to mention, you will have your own internal meetings to deal with like team meetings or catch ups with your boss. Technically, then, you have three main groups of activities to manage — the candidate, client and internal.

From English Teaching to Recruitment

There are plenty of ex-JET and English teachers who moved into recruitment, my ex-boss being one of them (who now runs two startups in Tokyo). Many have excelled and made a name for themselves, doubling, tripling and even quadrupling their salaries from 4 million to 10 million yen and above.

A quick search on LinkedIn for the query “recruiter” and “JET” will bring up several results of teachers who moved from English teaching to recruitment, and from there onwards to other industries. This quick search can serve as a starting point to give you some ideas of the sorts of career possibilities and transitions that you could take — but you don’t have to limit yourself to that, of course. Since recruitment is at the core a sales and marketing job, moving into a client-facing role where you financial targets and goals to achieve can set you up for success in a range of industries. It’s a real job.

Ultimately, it’s a very different type of job than English teaching. Your success will come down to your willingness to learn, mental toughness, and interpersonal skills. There are also lots of factors to consider, like the type of firm/industry/your personality/experience level/your boss, and so forth.

But the point is, the opportunity is there. Some English teachers fail, some do exceptionally well. For many, the step into recruitment provides a way to learn professional communication skills, save money, pay off student loans, learn about a specific industry in depth, and even gain management experience.

How do you find a good recruitment firm?

Everyone will have a different style and values, so determine what is right for you. Then use this as a lens to assess different recruitment companies during the interview process. I would always give companies the benefit of the doubt when interview, so if you find one aspect of the job you don’t like through the interview, don’t cancel the rest of your interviews. It’s almost always worth seeing out the interview process to the end to get a fuller picture of the company, not to mention for interview practice!

Here is a checklist of areas that you should assess:

1. Culture: What are the values of the company? What kind of people do they have working there now? Do people work as a team, or is it individual-based? Who is the CEO, and what are their goals for the company? How fast is decision making? Is the company fast-growing or is it closer to a “lifestyle” business? Is it a Japanese recruitment firm or foreign firm?
2. KPI’s: Key Performance Indicators. These are the metrics that the company/manager will use to assess your performance. You will live and breathe these, so it’s important that you are crystal clear on these. If you have to make 50 calls per day, is that the sort of environment you want to be in? Find out what these are and what the expectations are for consultants. KPI’s could include the number of resumes you sent per week, the number of candidates met face to face, the number of job interviews per week, and the number of clients you’ve met.
3. Company Size:  Larger recruitment companies have better training programs, smaller ones don’t — although there are exceptions. I would ask the recruitment company exactly what their program looks like and even request a schedule to see how in depth it looks. If they say they don’t have one and it’s more “on the job training (OTJ)”, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you already know how the recruitment industry works and are comfortable stepping into that sort of environment. Also, ask them “how big is your database?” A company with a small database of candidates is going to make it really tough for you.
4. Industry: Are you passionate about the pharmaceutical industry? Finance? E-commerce? IT? Startups? Fashion? How much Japanese do you need to use? Is it easy to switch industries and teams within the recruitment company once joined? Often times it’s not, especially if it’s a smaller company. You can narrow down your search of recruitment agencies based on the industries they cover, although this information isn’t always accessible online and the specific openings are going to depend often on timing.
5. Function. Similar to industry, the function you focus on is going to heavily influence the sort of network you build as well as the types of people you’ll talk to on a daily basis — this can also reflect on your own personality. For example, I was working in mostly sales/marketing recruitment, so a majority of the people I met were easy going and good communicators. This was a great fit for my personality because although I’m personally more interested in marketing and have done some sales work in part time jobs. However, if you’re working with engineers or operations/finance for example this might (not always) require you to take a different approach to everything from how you communicate to how you search for people.
6. The Team: Who will you be working with everyday? If you were stuck on a plane with these people for 12 hours, would you gouge your eyes out? You can do some digging on LinkedIn to see who works at the company and their backgrounds. I recommend spending as much time with the team and people in the company before making a decision to join as you’ll often learn more about the business from informal meetings than you will in a stuffy interview room.
7. Your Boss: Your direct manager will make or break your success in recruitment. Do not underestimate this. If they are supportive and provide hands-on training, you can shine. If not, then you will become another statistic — most people leave their jobs because they’re unhappy with their bosses. You want to ask them what their management style is, their best and worst hire, what they think makes someone successful on the job, how their management style has evolved, and make sure to spend at minimum 2-3 hours with them to get to know them.
8. Compensation package/salary: What is the base and bonus structure? How is the bonus determined? Is it a quarterly bonus, bi annual, yearly bonus? What is the expectation in the first 3 months? What is the worst case and best case salary scenarios for a 1st year hire in the company? Is it a team-based bonus pool, a draw-system, or 100% commission? If you are starting out, I suggest aiming for a company that has a relatively generous base salary. If you are more confident in your existing network/abilities, then you can target a higher bonus/commission structure (great risk, higher reward).

You won’t be able to assess most of these criteria until you actually meet the company, but you should start gathering information beforehand to the best of your ability.

Negative stereotypes

When I first interviewed for recruitment jobs in Japan the advice I read was spread across online forums, shrouded in negativity on reddit, and was questionable at best. There are a lot of bad recruitment firms — no doubt. But there are also dozens of progressive recruitment companies.

The worst recruitment firms have aggressive, cut-throat environments. They have high targets, toxic workplaces. Or, maybe they have people who simply don’t care and the pace is extremely slow. You can find out pretty quickly if this is the case by being proactive and doing a bit of research.

Most people are pushed through the interview process and don’t know the right questions to ask. Here are some tips and questions to ask to avoid the bad apples:

• What are my probation targets (the first three months on the job?). How are they going to measure your performance? Do you have to make 100 phone calls a day? That would suck. Request a detailed breakdown of the tasks that you actually have to do.
  • Your bosses management style. If you really click with your boss, a lot of the rest will take care of yourself. If you don’t, you’ll be miserable. Ask him/her what their management style is. Ask them what they do to help people who are underperforming. Ask them to share their most successful hire.
• Transparency. If they are not upfront about the salary structure and bonus structure, this is a red flag. What are they hiding?

Another way to do your due diligence is to simply speak to people who have worked at the company before. You can easily find people on Linkedin. Reach out to them, ask them how it was working there, why they left, and get multiple perspectives.

Lastly, spend time with the interviewers, not just an hour with your prospective boss. Really get to know them. Be honest to yourself about your meetings with people; if you had a bad gut feeling about someone, follow that instinct. The process goes something like this:

Gather information about company → Assess information → Assess gut feelings → Follow up on gut feeling by gather more information → Confirm/deny whether your gut feeling was accurate → Repeat process. Talk to them again, clarify big questions you have. Don’t get too flattered because a company offers you and feel pressured to accept. It’s your career.

Salaries

The compensation in recruitment is going differ in structure from firm to firm. You’ll find that the larger recruitment firms usually have a more stable, reasonable base salary and good bonuses. The small, boutique firms, though, can often have structures with much lower bases but high incentive bonuses. In other words, your overall earning potential is higher.

But in a smaller firm you’ll also usually have to bring your own network and resources will be more limited, so achieving that upper earnings potential might pose a much higher barrier. The general rule of thumb is that if you have zero experience in the recruitment industry in Japan, or any work experience at all, it’s best to start with a firm that has a guaranteed base salary so you don’t have to worry about putting food on the table. It consists of the following:

• A guaranteed base salary
• Bonus (quarterly/bi annually/yearly) depending on your performance and/or team/company performance
• Perks (expense account, paid-for trips, prizes and free stuff)
• Commuting expense (almost always guaranteed)
• Health insurance (kokumin hoken, deducted from monthly salary and required by law)
• Japanese Pension (nenkin, deducted from monthly salary)

So, is recruitment for you?

Recruitment as an industry (internal included) has one of the highest turnover rates, meaning that many people leave after a short time, usually within 6 months to one 1 year. It’s an unfortunate statistic but one that can be avoided if you take the time to properly assess the culture of each recruitment firm you’re applying for as well as understand exactly what you’re getting yourself into (as it will differ from company to company!). All this is a bit ironic because you would think recruitment companies would be good at hiring. Case in point, hiring is tough.

But why is it so tough? They say that recruitment is the business of rejection. You are always getting rejected by someone — whether that’s a potential client, or a prospective employee who doesn’t want to talk to you, or someone failing an interview. Everyone fears rejection to some degree, and that’s ok, we’re only human.

More important is your ability to bounce back from failure  — in other words, your resilience. If you don’t have tough skin, you’ll certainly build it in the process. If you want to gauge your level resilience and your fit for recruitment right now, a good measure is to look at other areas of your life which required tenacity. Have you ever had to work hard over a long period of time? It could be anything — running a marathon, playing piano, competitive team sports, weekly volunteer work, dance, you name it. If you’ve been able to spend a big chunk of time committing to an activity while juggling other parts of life, then you probably have at least the basic mental toughness to get through tough times during recruitment.

A List of Recruitment Firms in Japan:

Executive Recruitment

• Korn Ferry
• Heidrick and Struggles
• Egon Zehnder
• Spencer Stuart

Large Contingency Recruitment Firms

• Recruit
• Intelligence
• Robert Walters
• Hays
• RGF
• Michael Page
• Enworld

Small/Midsize Recruitment Firms

• Morgan McKinley
• Wahl & Case
• Optia Partners
• CDS
• Robert Half
• East West Consulting

Staffing/Haken

• Randstad
• Manpower
• Recruit
• Pasona
• Robert Walters

Online Recruitment Platforms

• LinkedIn
• Jobs in Japan
• Daijob
• Gaijinpot
• Wantedly
• Careercross

Learn more

If you’re serious about getting a job in the recruitment industry you can find more in my book: How to Become a Recruiter in Japan. I cover in depth interview strategy, tips to avoid common pitfalls, and salary negotiation tactics. I also provide a 1-1 consulting service to discuss your job search process in Japan. You can find out more here.

Author Bio:

My name is Misha and I’m a Tokyo-based ex-recruiter, author and blogger. In the past 5 years I’ve helped companies like Amazon, Facebook and Netflix build their hiring strategies, started (and shut down) my own company, learned Japanese, and quit my job. My goal is to share what I’ve learned in hopes of providing something useful to those around me. Follow me on Quora, LinkedIn or my blog here.