Vol.62 – Social Media in Recruiting and Job Hunting Spreading in Japan

Following the previous article Vol.61 – Recruiting, Job Hunting and Media in Japan Until Today, how social media has started to enter Japan recruiting and job hunting market since 2010 is briefly explained in this article.




1. How social media started to being used in new graduate recruiting in Japan?



How social media started to being used in new graduate recruiting in Japan since 2010 diversifying social media use is best understood by looking back the social media related news and announcement made.



First, from October 1, 2010, Recruit Navi(gation), the leading web portal for new graduate recruiting and job hunting in Japan, made alliance with Facebook connection search.



Then in November 2010, a few Japanese IT companies such as CyberAgent that provides online services such as the most popular blogging platform started to leverage Facebook in recruiting.



Also in November 2010, SoftBank Human Capital started providing a programme/content that supports job hunting leveraging Ustream.



In March 2011, En Japan, a leading recruiting agency in Japan and Microsoft Japan announced that they are to start providing an online service supporting recruiting and job hunting leveraging Facebook.



And in May 2011, Facebook announced that “Work for Us”, a recruiting tool, is to be rolled out in Japan, and LinkedIn is to roll out Japanese version soon.



2. How some recent new Japanese graduates started to leverage social media in job hunting?



The author would like to introduce a case of the new Japanese graduates who fully leveraged social media in their job hunting to answer this. Such a case may still be the exceptions in Japan but such cases are likely to become the majority in the future because the Internet and mobile phones have been around future new graduates since their childhood and they would likely be enjoying social media everyday.



1) What is the profile and background of the new graduate of the case?



The case is of a new graduate who landed on a job leveraging social media to the fullest to start working in an IT company this April.



Being a great fan of western music, she had been enjoying social media (SNS) since junior high school, starting with MySpace which she happened to know from looking at website of the artists. She had been enjoying sending messages to the artists and their blogs, and sharing information with members of the online community.



Then she went to the U.S. for nine months to study English and started Facebook to keep in touch with her friends in Japan. Facebook was still not unknown in Japan so she did so by teaching her friends what Facebook is and how to leverage it.



2) Why did she decide to leverage social media in her job hunting?



With such a background, she decided to leverage social media in her job hunting because she was not comfortable in one-way online communication from companies of traditional web portals such as Recruit Navi(gation).



She first accessed to gather information of the companies she is interested in and selected which companies to apply directly instead of making so many entries via web portals applying to attend seminars.



3) What social media did she leverage in particular?



It was Twitter because then she came up with an idea of leveraging Twitter in connecting directly online with company recruiting managers, making two-way interaction and consequently understanding the company better.



She started to follow companies she is interested in and their recruiting managers, and some business persons, to sending messages directly, leaving comments to their tweets and tweeting to express her own opinion, all to achieve her objective in her style of interactive communication with business persons.



4) What was the difficulty in leveraging social media in job hunting?



It was to find relevant companies and business persons to follow. This is because only limited companies had been leveraging Twitter in recruiting when she was job hunting, i.e. in 2009 and 2010.



5) What was the outcome of leveraging social media?



Despite the difficulty of leveraging social media in job hunting, it was worth an effort; she managed to meet face-to-face with some representatives of the companies. And she decided to join a company after having had a fruitful face-to-face communication with the representative of the company.





In the next article the author would like to explain how a few leading, innovative Japanese companies have started to leverage social media in recruiting in earnest.





References:-

“Leveraging Twitter and Facebook in New Graduate Recruiting” by Yoshioka, Mina, from Monthly HRM Materials (July 2011 Edition) – Business Publishing P29-43 (In Japanese)

http://www.busi-pub.com/



Resources:-

Japan had been behind leveraging social media in recruiting and job hunting but it started to take off recently. Social media use in such area drastically started to diversify since October 2010 and although still extremely limited, there is a case in which a new graduate successfully landed on a job leveraging social media (Twitter) to the fullest.