Organizations & Hiring
Designing the organization, making the key hires, running the hiring process. Worked through with cases and models.
- 01AI Can Tidy Your Interview Notes. It Can't Make the Call7 min
AI can transcribe interviews, sort answers and flag missing evidence. Deciding what a candidate actually did stays human. Plus Whisper errors and Japan's rules.
- 02Fujitsu stopped setting graduate pay by degree7 min
From April 2026 Fujitsu pays new graduates by job and level, not degree. Why foreign firms hiring graduates in Japan should define roles before the pay table.
- 03Disney's 66 Character.AI hires: a talent map block7 min
Disney is taking about 65 Character.AI staff at roughly $60M a year in pay and bid $20M for a license. On a talent map, an acqui-hire buys one whole block.
- 04“It was all me”: finding what a candidate really did7 min
A candidate says they did it all? Probe five things: personal actions, decisions, numbers, failure and others' roles. Structured interviews reach 0.42 validity.
- 05Universe 25: The Mice Had Food. They Ran Out of Roles8 min
Universe 25 stopped growing at 2,200 mice with shelter for 3,840. Calhoun blamed a shortage of social roles. What that means, carefully, for fast-growing teams.
- 06Organizations and Hiring in Japan: A Reading Guide11 min
Most hiring and retention problems in Japan are design problems. Score the role first; after joining, structure and the boss keep people longer than pay does.
- 07Reading Japan's 65% Offer Decline Rate5 min
Japan's 65.1% new-graduate offer decline rate counts students with offers, not offers issued. Mid-career has no common figure. Treat the close as its own stage.
- 08When bad news stops traveling up6 min
Edmondson's psychological safety: speaking up won't be punished. Not atmosphere, but whether bad news travels up. Resignation-proxy data measures its inverse.
- 09Score the role before you score the person5 min
Hackman and Oldham score the role itself on five dimensions. A low-scoring role keeps nobody. Score the role before hiring; if it is low, redesign it first.
- 10Pay removes complaints. It doesn't create commitment.5 min
Herzberg: what causes complaints and what creates commitment are different sets. Pay is hygiene; enough of it buys no engagement. So raises don't retain.