Finding a Job in Japan

Updated April 2021

So you want to work in Japan but aren’t sure how. As someone who is on their second job in the country, I’ll tell you what I did as it may provide some help to a few of you.

First of all, my work background.

WORK BACKGROUND

For some context, I began my work life in Japan by teaching English through the JET Programme. It is one of the most common jobs for a foreigner to hold in Japan regardless of if they actually care about English education. JET is known to be the most accommodating, but Interac, Gaba, etc. are alternatives people can look into.

Prior to that, I was doing social media marketing at a startup in Silicon Valley before I just couldn’t ignore my desire to experience life in Japan anymore.

JOB SEARCHING IN JAPAN

Teaching English can be a trap if you’re not serious about that career path, and I wasn’t. Keeping in tune with the online social and startup worlds was what helped me find my second and current job.

But I had a couple of big challenges:

1. I wasn’t fluent and didn’t speak business level Japanese

2. My only work experience in the country was teaching English

I tried reaching out and tweeting to Japanese startup founders to no avail — they weren’t ready to expand internationally (where I would fit in).

Networking with anyone at internationally-ready companies were limited since JET has the vast majority of its workers living in the countryside.

Paying attention to trends in Japan - the growing number of outbound-looking companies, the push for foreign tourists, the increase in usage of international social apps and services by Japanese - led me to come across the service that helped me.

The tool that I became aware of that helped me get my second job was Wantedly.

About Wantedly

Wantedly can be called Japan’s LinkedIn, with about 3 million users and 40,000 registered companies as of April 2021. [J]

It’s a service that looks to connect people and companies from a more vision and empathy alignment approach, rather than one that’s focused on things like salary.

There’s more English now than when I began using it in 2014 which will be helpful. It also has broken its service into 2 areas:

• Wantedly People - The profile and people networking side, also the ability to scan business cards (5M users)

• Wantedly Connect - The connection of people and companies (3M users)

Wantedly is used mostly by those in the IT and digital space. Here’s the approximate breakdown of its users, according to Direct Sourcing Lab [J]:

• Engineers - 25%

• Sales - 18%

• Marketing - 16%

• Directors - 14%

• Designers - 13%

• Corporate - 10%

• Writers - 3%

To compare, most on LinkedIn are in business development.

My experience on Wantedly

I created a profile, wrote my experiences in Japanese and simple English to quickly show I’m somewhat capable in both languages. From there, I began “showing interest” (there’s a button) in interesting companies that either were hiring or allowing office visits.

I had a few meetings, all of which ended up being with companies not ready to do international work, until I met with one where the CEO was ready to start moving in that direction due to realizing that Japan was behind in the online space.

There are job listings on GaijinPot or JapanToday Jobs as well. If you’re looking for an internet-related job, possibly at a startup, check out Justa too.

Here’s my video where I talk about my experience:

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