Organizations & Hiring

A new company or Japan entity has no facts to grade in year one. Write expectations, record facts, have one conversation, and set grades and curves in year two.

A first grade table for a small Japan entity: six steps defined by what a person can carry, kept apart from titles like section head, plus the overtime trap.

Japan's department heads earn 2.05 times untitled staff, so specialist tracks become holding pens. Why one grade scale, with management as an allowance, works.

Relax what can be learned fast and is cheap to get wrong. Pre-hire experience correlates 0.06 with performance, and JLPT N1 never tests speaking. Keep judgment.

Only 32.7% of small Japanese sites hired mid-career in a year. Keep backfill roles in-house, send scarce or confidential searches out, and use RPO in between.

Of 10.23 million people in Japan who want a new job, only 3.6 million are looking. That is why shortlists overlap, and how a brief and a map change it.

Run one job description through Japan's official statistics and five reasonable requirements leave about ten likely candidates a year. Count the pool first.

Where a company's former employees went, whether they moved up and when they left says more than exit interviews. How to build a reverse talent map in Japan.

Interview scores pile up at 3 because the middle is the cheapest score: never badly wrong, never explained. Four causes, and four ways to make it cost more.

Yes-or-no hiring debates stall because each side is right about a different layer. Score four layers, grade by the weakest, and decide what to fix.