Looking back on last week's column, I realize that the title "Firing an Employee" sounds rather heartless. To be honest, it's the one part of running a business that I really dislike, so I always try to find other ways to solve problems before even thinking about firing an employee. However, there are times when there is no other option. Luckily, being in Japan, the soft...

In conservative Japan, one of the most important acts you can perform as a manager is to let a staff member go. Not only are there legal issues, but also a political minefield to negotiate if you want to maintain the morale of your remaining staff. Firings happen for many reasons. While in the West...

With the advent of online recruiting, the whole process of how companies find people through the media has changed. Although companies still place newspaper ads and accept paper resumes, the volume of jobs advertised this way is now just a fraction of those online. Therefore, it is essential to understand the online process to...

Thanks to those readers who responded to my Surviving the Weeding Process series. I had one good piece of feedback from a guy who wondered if my advice of getting certified really was a productive thing to do when in fact experience is probably much more important and useful to future employers. I would agree with him 100% that experience beats certification in this current market, especially since I'm a high-school drop-out myself! However, the point of the series was...

Phone interviews are increasingly being used to screen applicants because they are quick, and tough questions can be asked by the screener without embarrassment. Unfortunately on your side you don't get much chance to fully interact with the interviewer - for example, you can't use body language...

In this age of performance improvement, candidate-hunting recruitment consultants and company HR people are overworked and under appreciated. To keep up with the demands of their business managers, they are having to become more efficient and a common way they're doing this is to cut down the time spent on overall interviews by weeding out weaker candidates early on. The weeding process happens by throwing out resumes that don't include...

Reader: I am a software developer in Canada and after travelling to Japan several times last year, I've decided I want to live there. However, I realize that I need to bring my language skills up to a high-enough level in order to work there. The problem is that I'm 26 and I've read on several school websites that due to recent abuses, the Ministry of Justice is tightening up on the issuance of student visas...

As many readers will know, among other things, I'm in the IT business, so I follow the local trends quite closely. What I'm seeing over the last 4 months (Jan-Apr 2005) is that foreign firms are back in the market for senior IT people, both software, hardware, and networks/security. Just about daily, not just through DaiJob, but also personally. I'm receiving urgent requests from clients for...

Continuing on about jobs and opportunities where you don't need to speak Japanese to work in Japan, probably the best paid jobs are those in categories in which Japan has a shortage of qualified people. These shortages are usually in areas which require a high level of technical expertise - not just technology, but also...

While Japanese ability is required for most jobs in multinationals, and is certainly a strategic skill to have, there are nevertheless a number of job categories out there which do not require much more than basic “Where is the train station?” skills. Top of these would be of course English...