Faced with a tight labour market, businesses across Japan are investing more time in the recruitment process, often holding out until they are sure they are hiring the right people.
While this may appear to be a sensible approach, the fact is, the ‘perfect’ candidate doesn’t exist. Holding out until you find talent who tick every box can mean a drawn out recruitment process. This brings increased risk of missing out on the best talent or candidates with a particular expertise.
Even when you have found the best candidates, you'll still got to lure them in with the right salary offer, and ensure they are going to fit well within the business. As an employer, knowing where the top talent can be found, and what you can do to appeal to high calibre candidates is essential.
Finding the right people
High levels of employment right across Japan make it critical for hiring companies to give themselves the best possible chance of attracting high quality applicants who can add significant value to the organisation.
This involves much more than simply advertising a role online and waiting for CVs to flood in.
The key to hiring the right people is to have a proactive recruitment strategy in place. You may have particular individuals in mind for the role that you’ve met through your professional network. However more often than not, hiring great people means being open to candidates you haven't met before. Advertising on jobs boards may help track them down, but partnering with a recruitment agency offers a greater chance of success while providing savings of time and company resources.
Importantly, remuneration remains a primary motivator for candidates when it comes to selecting a role - and staying on the payroll. Companies cannot afford to lose touch with market salaries because businesses that fail to offer competitive remuneration packages are likely to experience difficulty attracting high calibre talent.
Recruitment consultants have in-depth knowledge of current remuneration trends across Asia including non-salary benefits, which they can use to an employer's advantage in hiring the right people.
How to recruit and hire top candidates
Once you’ve attracted talented professionals to interview, you need to know how to win them over. Interview questions are critical in identifying candidates who are a good match for the company and the role.
Ultimately though, you need to make a job offer that quality talent can’t resist. Offering a salary and remuneration package that fails to meet market benchmarks could see you miss out on good candidates. But go in too high and you could be exceeding salary budgets and promising something the business cannot afford.
Look beyond an attractive salary because a comprehensive package of benefits is often needed in Asia’s competitive hiring market.
Six factors to address
Hiring the right people can come down to a company’s ability to address six factors:
- Competitive salary – A healthy pay cheque may not be a candidate's sole concern when considering a job offer, but it is still a central issue. The Robert Half Salary Guide is widely respected for offering industry benchmarks for employers to know how much they should be offering.
- Flexible benefits - In Asia, as in many parts of the developed world, the workplace is evolving and flexible work options will increasingly become the hallmark of ‘employers of choice’.
- Training – Improving the skill set of your people offers a win-win for the company. It gives professionals an opportunity to enhance their market value and gives the company a team who are ready for greater responsibilities in the future.
- Strong management – Hiring great employees is easier when you have a strong leadership team in place to begin with. Aim to build a management team that inspires and motivates your employees.
- More responsibility – High quality candidates are hungry to take on more responsibility and progress up the career ladder. As an employer, it pays to have a formal program of development in place to nurture top talent.
- Work-life balance - Technology has made flexible work practices possible, and providing options to telecommute or permitting flexible work hours can go a long way to attracting top talent. Research underpinning the Robert Half Salary Guide confirms that younger candidates in particular are often the main drivers behind the need to balance career demands with life outside work.
In essence, the process of hiring the right people starts by Identifying what your ideal employee looks like, and how much the company is willing to pay. Check with the Robert Half Salary Guide to be sure this is commensurate with market salaries, and then look for ways to put your company ahead of competitors.
