Global Perspective: Attracting and Retaining Talent in Japan

In Japan, finding people with the right skill set and cultural fit is critical to helping our clients attain their business goals while helping candidates find the right jobs and achieve their career objectives. But the rapid pace of technological change, coupled with a low birth rate, aging population, and limited talent pool, particularly among bilingual professionals, has made this task more challenging. As a result, the demand for specialist recruitment partners is higher than ever in this island nation, which is the third largest contributor to global GDP.

Scott Wallace, general manager for Allegis Group in Japan, recently shared how such topics are playing out in the APAC region (where we have a presence in eight countries) and how we’re distinguishing ourselves from the competition. Notably, Japan is the second largest staffing and recruitment market globally, valued at nearly $60 billion in 2016, and is still in its infancy, having been established in the mid-1990s, according to SIA’s Global Staffing Market Forecast 2016. Hence, this island nation represents a significant opportunity for companies like ours, as well as for businesses looking for top talent and candidates looking for their next career move.

Wallace acknowledges in a recent Eurobiz Japan article that to succeed in Japan, “you have to be agile to reflect the needs of the market. It’s all about managing relationships – our ability to help as many people as possible.”

To ensure that Allegis Group continues to provide a quality experience to clients and candidates, we conduct annual Voice of the Customer (VOC) research in Japan, as well as our other locations globally, to find out what stakeholders want from the recruitment industry and how we deliver against this.

One trend we see across the APAC region – and particularly in Japan – is the demand for specialist recruitment partners with unparalleled expertise in specific industries and skill sets. As higher-quality specialist services become more in demand by companies and candidates, generalist recruitment companies without a consistent process for providing simple sourcing services will eventually be eliminated by the market.

Findings from our recent Talent Advisory Survey support this trend. As part of our efforts to identify behaviors of high-performing recruitment organizations, more than 12,000 talent acquisition professionals and job seekers from around the world indicated a strong preference to work with recruiting partners. In fact, 90% of employers surveyed use recruitment/staffing firms to fill their sourcing pipelines, and 90% of candidates ranked recruitment/staffing firms as their second highest job source.

“We try to understand the needs of clients and candidates to a deeper, more significant degree,” Wallace says. “Our number one goal is delivering behavior that extends to providing higher-level services for our clients and candidates. We’re skill set specialists, rather than industry specialists.”

In Japan’s competitive market, companies across the Allegis Group enterprise stand apart by using our world-class processes for attracting and retaining the best talent to advance any organization’s goals. Three of our recruitment brands operate under one roof, including Aerotek, focused on technical, professional, and industrial positions; TEKsystems, which offers IT staffing solutions and talent management experience; as well as Aston Carter, which provides staffing and recruitment services for accounting and finance; audit, risk, and compliance; banking and financial services; business support; communications; digital; human resources; marketing; operations; sales; and strategy, change, and transformation positions.  

Interested in joining our Allegis Group team? Click here to explore careers within the organization.