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Preface
Although it is not true recently, Japan has had a popular salaryman working style of lifetime employment. The rate of job change is low compared to other countries.
Startups are required by investors to grow rapidly, but unlike advertising, hiring is often the slowest point of business growth. It is not something that can be achieved by just setting quota.
In addition, it is becoming more and more difficult to create new business opportunities every year. Some businesses are structurally difficult to recruit.
Business Domain Difficulties
One of the difficulties in recruitment is unique business domain.
For example, it is difficult to attract people due to public guilt if the service is adult-related or involves gambling. Even if the worker doesn't care about it when he/she was young, he/she may change jobs when they get married.
The other concern is non-tech speciality. For example, engineers are easy to imagine a scientific paper compilation service. However, if the business is for lawyer, it might be less motivating.
Recently, there are people who have changed jobs from completely different professions via programming schools, so one strategy is to target such people. Many of them are more junior anyway.
The other way is hire domain expert. For legal services, hiring a lawyer and separating the domain part and the development part as much as possible is the strategy. Reduce job descriptions to increase the interchangeability of workers.
The other strategy is to hold regular study sessions and focus on educating existing members on domain knowledge.
Geographical Difficulties
The number of companies that work remotely is increasing due to the covid-19. That means if the companies cannot take this approach, they are facing the difficulties.
For example, companies that require image recognition by physical devices such as Amazon Go may inevitably need physical maintenance due to hardware restriction. Companies that are contracted to analyze data close to personal identity information may be required to work in an environment without Internet condition.
Not being able to get hired people from country areas is a pain. The countermeasure might be to provide office work compensation, or to separate much jobs as possible that requires office work.
Language Difficulties
Let's say you have a cross-border service to sell Japanese cosmetics in China. The users are Chinese, so the UI must be created in Chinese.
Unfortunately, the employees, including the representative, are Japanese. What would be your strategy in such a case?
One strategy would be to create the website in English and separate the development from the translation part. Another strategy would be to actively support foreign engineers with visa support.
Hiring difficulty is not employee problem
As mentioned above, it is possible to complement hiring weakness by arranging them into several patterns.
On the other hand, it is difficult to solve recruitment difficulties by employee members. When you start a business, what you do and when you do it is a factor that has more weight on success than the excellence of the people in it. The destiny come from founder's decision.
If you were an investor and someone told you that he had invented an amazing air conditioner that would sell in 2021, would you bet on it? If you were in Africa, it might be a chance. However in Japan, every house already has air conditioner.
Even if the founder is a serial entrepreneur, it would be hard to beat the macro economy. If you have insights about the trends, your business will succeed in 90%.
