Japan's increasingly competitive
recruitment process, in which third-year university students spend the winter
attending explanatory sessions, job fairs and interviews in the hope of
landing job offers for the following year, is under fire for being outdated and inconvenient for both
companies and young people.
"There are many strange and irrational aspects of the
recruitment process," says Yuki Honda, a sociology professor at the
University of Tokyo who specializes in education. "(It is) very lengthy
and troublesome, and there is no relevance
between university curriculums and job content."
Honda is not alone among university
professors in complaining that her students take too much time off studying
in their junior year to focus on finding employment, and thinks that the job
search should take place after students have completed their studies.
However, she acknowledges that the competitiveness of the system makes many
feel that securing a job is more important than what they learn at
university.
Katsuyuki Oonuma, a third-year law
student at Waseda University who took part in the demonstration, sees the recruitment process as a lengthy and
expensive waste of time. "Explanatory sessions are completely useless
and expensive too. It costs money to go to and for the company to put it on,
so it's not a good thing for them either," he says. "The
recruitment process has opened up a huge market for companies who want to
sell suits or consulting courses. We need to get rid of this ridiculous
culture where it can cost people up to 500,000 yen ($6,456) for the season."
Oonuma, the student who participated
in the rally to protest against the current recruitment system, thinks that
Japanese companies should employ an internship
system so that both candidates and companies alike can better assess their
suitability for each other. "You could do an internship for up to a year
and when you finish you decide whether you want to do the job, and quit if
you don't," he says, adding that such a system would also benefit companies.
"There might be people who pass the interview but you can't use them.
You can't see if someone is capable or not unless you actually see them
work."
Among some of Japan's largest
companies, there are already changes afoot.
Sony recently announced it would be looking for open-minded, creatively
thinking candidates, saying they could wear casual clothes instead of a suit
to attend recruitment events, and will allow anyone who has graduated within
three years (rather than one) to apply. Uniqlo Co. and Nestle Japan put
forward a plan to recruit students in their first or second years of
university in part-time positions, with the opportunity to be promoted to a
manager or regular employee position once they graduate. Fujitsu Ltd.,
meanwhile, announced that it would be open to consider humanities or liberal
arts students rather than simply those with technical backgrounds.
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VOCABULARY
1. Outdated (adj.) - it is no longer considered useful or
effective, because something more modern exists [↪ old-fashioned]
2. Irrational (adj.) - not based on clear thought or reason [= unreasonable]
3. Relevance (n) - relation
to the matter at hand; connection
4. Demonstration (n) - an event at
which a large group of people meet to protest or to support something in public
5. Internship (n) - a job that lasts for a short time, that
someone, especially a student, does in order to gain experience [↪ intern]
6. Afoot (adj.) - being planned or happening
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Discuss about job
recruitment in your country.
2. Do you consider this
system outdated? Explain.
3. Is it easy to get a
job nowadays? Why?
4. What are the
requirements in applying for a job?
5. Talk about part time
job / fulltime job.
