Job-hunting season begins for Spring 2020 graduates in Japan

March 1, 2019

Tokyo--Japanese companies started on Friday to offer employment seminars for third-year university students who are due to graduate in spring 2020, marking the opening of the job-hunting season for the upcoming graduates.

The job market continues to be favorable to students as the country has been facing severe labor shortages.

The Japan Business Federation, the nation's largest business lobby, known as Keidanren, has decided to abolish its guidelines for corporate hiring of college students graduating in 2021 or later.

Keidanren's decision will likely prompt many companies to start moving earlier than last year to secure talented students, an indication that the guidelines are already losing their substance.

According to a survey by job information provider Mynavi Corp., 35.2 pct of companies said that they would start this month job interviews with students, up 5.8 percentage points from a year before.

The proportion is higher than for any other month. Last year, many companies held such interviews in April.

"Companies are increasingly front-loading the employee selection process on the back of labor shortages," Takuya Kurita, head of Mynavi's research and marketing division, explained.

Recruit Career Co. sponsored a total of 41 "corporate research" seminars for students across Japan last month, up sharply from two in February 2018.

As companies and students both face the need to achieve results quickly, "we're aiming to help them have contacts as early as possible so that students' job-hunting activities will go smoothly," a public relations official of Recruit Career said.

Two-day joint corporate seminars hosted by Recruit Career began at the Makuhari Messe convention center in the city of Chiba, east of Tokyo, on Friday.

"I want to move actively and decide a target company," a 21-year-old male student from Nihon University, one of the participants, said.

"I'll keep pursuing what I want to do," said a 21-year-old female student from a private university, who hopes to work in the broadcasting industry.

Some 1,000 companies and around 24,000 students are expected to take part in the two-day event, according to Recruit Career. Jiji Press