Tardis Group – Yuta Kasai, Director, Accounting & Finance / HR Recruitment, Japan

Yuta Kasai, a Senior Recruitment Consultant for Accounting and Finance professionals, moved to Sydney with his Australian wife and two daughters earlier this year, and, with the support of Tardis Group he’s been able to continue to cover Japan, remotely.

This flexible working arrangement offered by Tardis is one in a million in Japan, in fact it maybe even rarer than that and, has allowed Yuta’s wife to be reunited with her family and their children go to an Australian school, which Yuta says is run quite differently to those in Japan.

‘In Australia it’s so much more laid back, even school is so different, kids enjoy going to school here every day.’

While schools and workplaces are more relaxed in Australia, Yuta does miss Japan, which is steeped in tradition and culture, is known for its polite and hospitable people and offers an extremely clean and convenient environment.

Yuta makes special mention of the quality of products in Japan. He says, “most things you buy in (or from) Japan are of noticeably high quality, there’s no complaint when you buy it. But the sad thing is that to provide products and service with great quality, people in Japan are working extremely hard and not having quality life style,’ he said.

‘Many candidates I talk to are working so much overtime including working on weekends. Japanese people, culturally, are more reluctant to speak their mind and more likely to be tolerant and patient, but that can come at the expense of their health and stress levels. In the end, those people decide to change job instead of talking to their company about change’ he said.

‘Also, another problem I see in Japan is that it is difficult for people to return to work after having children. As it is not advanced in flexible working arrangements in Japan yet even though some of the companies have taken some initiatives. Having children and working at the same time is very difficult and quite often they cannot even go back to the same job.’

Yuta says the need for reduced working hours and greater flexibility has been in discussion in Japan, but the process of implementing change is slow. Even if a company implements flexible working arrangements such as “work from home”, “Remote work” and “Flex work”, it is difficult to use it because culturally it looks like you are not committed.

‘Now I’m working in Australia with more flexibility, I’m enjoying having accountability in my work and I realise that this motivates me to work harder, which provide better results. ‘he said.

“In the same way, I really do believe it would be better to give more flexibility and evaluate a worker’s contribution by their results, not by the time they spend at work. Especially when we have such a shortage of good talent in Japan, we should focus on sustaining good talent by giving more options of how they want to work which would help the company increase their chance to attract and retain great talent in this candidate shortage market”

Yuta also mentioned that Japan has always been a candidate driven market” due its incremental gap between the demand and the supply of “dream candidate”. On the contrary, there are lots of skilled candidates who’s talents are being wasted simply due to their personal commitments or inability to comply with employers demands

Yuta and his Tokyo-based team are usually recruiting either Japanese Native or bilingual candidates – the latter proves the most challenging.

‘Of the 126 million people in Japan, only less than 5 per cent speak English fluently. In addition to their bilingual ability, they need to be able have specific skills and traits to match with the clients list of expectations: Clients want candidate to have stable background with specific industry experience and matching seniority in job contents and age. There are so many other aspects and it all needs to match to their needs. At the end of the process there’ll be very few or none who match the requirements of the position, but the employer is always looking for the “dream candidate” and prefers to continue the search for long time until they find their “dream candidate”.’

Yuta says, being able to work long hours and not having any restriction in when and where to work is required as one of the aspects of “dream candidate” quite often. ‘These perfections of candidate selection in Japan make the recruitment task very difficult,’ he said.

‘I am truly grateful that Tardis is allowing me working in this flexible working style, it has allowed my family to have more option in life and motivated me to work harder. I hope more companies will allow different working style like Tardis and I am happy to help people to find a job which allows them to have a better quality of life style.’

Yuta was born and raised in Japan and studied Commerce at University, before working in Sales for a company in Hokkaido. He worked in Australia for a Japanese travel company for three years before returning to Tokyo where he served another recruitment company for eight years prior to joining Tardis. He’s enjoyed serving his clients and candidates throughout the past decade.

If you are looking for a new challenge and would be open to a confidential discussion about your career progression, please do not hesitate to contact Yuta Kasai directly on yuta.kasai@tardis-group.com / Mob: +61 420 988 653.