Ninagawa can’t dunk a basketball or run the 40-yard dash in 4.3 seconds. But at 22, he is more highly prized than a promising student athlete. As a senior at the University of Tokyo-the most elite college in the world’s most buoyant economy-he represents Japan Inc’s hottest product. It’s a little like the courting of America’s top law students and M.B.A. grads-but far more ardent, thanks to Japan’s ultratight labor force. “I don’t think it was so hard for me to get a job,” deadpans Ninagawa. He shunned many other job prospects before finally settling on a small but prosperous financial-services company.
Finding and keeping new talent has become the most exasperating of tasks for companies in Japan. Every new recruit gets, on average, 1.4 job offers, and during the just-completed season some 400,000 jobs went unfilled, according to a survey by Recruit Research Co. Even for prestigious companies-Sony, Mitsubishi Bank, Fujitsu-those numbers present a big problem. Not so long ago, they could wait for grads from Japan’s elite schools to come to them. Not anymore. Sony this year actually ran a “no academic history” recruiting campaign, in which it hired 100 liberal-arts majors without even asking which university they attended. And Sony is considered one of the most attractive employers. For foreign companies trying to cut it in one of the world’s toughest markets, the labor shortage has become a nightmare. “[It’s] our No. 1 problem,” concedes a senior executive with IBM Japan, the lone American company to rank in a survey among the 20 most desirable places to work in Japan.
The crunch has turned the recruiting process– once as orderly and refined as a tea ceremony-into a free-for-all. The rules, set by the Japan Federation of Employers in 1972, prohibit job offers before Aug. 1. Some companies even put a WE WILL NOT SEE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS UNTIL AUGUST sign on the door of their recruitment offices. But the signs-and the “gentlemen’s agreement”-have been a joke for years. Some consulting firms do a booming business simply telling companies when rivals start recruiting, and which students they are targeting. Companies now routinely spend 1 million yen-$7,400-simply on courting individual prospects. For Tokyo University graduates, says the personnel director in one major company, the price can go as high as $45,000. The process often starts with a cup of coffee near company headquarters, but escalates quickly to baseball games, boat rides and expensive meals. Says a male student from Meiji University who took an offer from a major bank, “I wouldn’t have been able to stand it if it had gone on longer.”
The season is hard on managers, too. Coddling visiting prospects “is our top priority during the summer,” says the manager of a large shipbuilding company, who escorted two graduate students from Osaka University all day and then took them to an expensive members-only club in downtown Tokyo that night. “When ‘good’ students visit our plant,” the executive sighs, “all of the appointments and deadlines of the day are automatically postponed.” For all the hassle, the execs know that the bottom line is the bottom line: they put up with the trouble, says one, “because we are afraid of losing them.” Seniors can expect full mailboxes and free meals for years to come.
