Profile
Building organizations, sales and technology in JapanNobu Sato. I started as a software engineer, moved into recruiting, then ran HR. Looking back it was one job the whole time: a company comes to Japan, and I build the first version of its organization.
This site is what I have collected along the way. Which things have to happen in order, how to read people, how to read Japan's numbers.
Career
Engineering
2011 – 2016My first five years were as an IT project manager at the headquarters of a large logistics group.
One project stayed with me. My team spent 200 million yen building a business system. After launch we counted the users. Fewer than fifty. The money was real. The usage was not.
Then I moved into recruiting. The interviewer asked me one thing: you have never done HR, is what you know enough? I said recruiting is scheduling plus matching. I was half right. The scheduling half really is like project management: steps, pace, where things get stuck. The matching half I had underestimated. People perform, and people change. A hiring manager and a candidate get along in the interview, then they start working together, their ways of working clash, and it fails. Reading people took me years to work out. What I learned is in the four layers and in what I look for in interviews.
Recruiting
2016 – 2020The next four years were three companies, all technical recruiting. I hired new-graduate engineers for a recruiting platform and ran its campus hiring in China, built global recruiting from zero at a robotics company, and at a talent consultancy filled more than seventy positions in a year with two assistants.
Building
2020 – presentSince then I have led HR and strategy at three companies, in robotics, games and fintech. I have hired more than fifty people in a year, built hiring and performance systems from scratch, recruited executives and trained managers. I opened offices in Taipei, Shanghai, Osaka, Fukuoka and Okinawa, some starting from finding the space, some from the first hire. Later I built a sales team from zero too, and the work stopped being only HR.
I have also got it wrong. Once I was hiring a Japanese-English IT project manager and insisted on a native Japanese speaker. Six months, no hire. I dropped that condition and filled the role in a month. Every extra requirement cuts the pool, and it took me half a year to learn it. Another time, at an overseas office, I put two senior HR people in charge together. It worked while I was there. When I stepped back they could not get along, and one left. Both went into the method. The closest write-ups are a talent map is not a list and when two heads work.
Education and languages
- 2011Waseda University, Master of Engineering
- 2009Nanjing University, BSc in Software Engineering
- Working languages: Japanese, English, Chinese
How I work
Order first
When a launch goes badly, in hindsight the order was usually wrong, not the work. So the first thing I do is set the order: draw the market and talent maps, then decide what to sell, how, and who sells it, and only then the rules. Why the first hire in Japan should not be sales is about exactly this order.
No guessing
Only what I can verify counts as fact. A company's customer count, a job post's requirements, a candidate's track record: each starts as what they say until checked. If I cannot check it, I say so rather than fill the gap. A judgment needs one concrete event behind it, or it does not go in. This is the first of the three ground rules I hold myself to.
People by responsibility
Cut a role by what it is accountable for. The title is a hint, no more. I read people in four layers. Core: what they want most and where their line is. If that does not fit, ability does not save it. Patterns: how they act under pressure, which sets how far they go. Equipment: skills, the easiest layer to add. Context: whether they fit the boss and the team. The terms are in the glossary.
One picture for HQ and the field
When headquarters and the Japan team fight, they are usually looking at different things. A big part of my job is getting both sides to see the same numbers and the same situation, each in its own words. What foreign companies struggle with in Japan comes down to people, not paperwork.
What I write
Four columns. Launching in Japan: the order of things, and where the first-year money goes. Organizations & Hiring: hiring, reading people and building teams in Japan. Japan by the Numbers: every figure starts with its definition and denominator. Career: for people changing jobs in Japan.
Contact
If you disagree with an article, or want to commission a piece, an interview or a talk, write to me. Japanese, English or Chinese all work.