I pretty much always tell people in my first meeting or phone call that I am based in Miyazaki, Kyushu (That’s right. The place with the good chicken, steak, and expensive mangoes!) but often come to Tokyo for meetings. For some reason, many people seem to think we work from our bedrooms, dressed in undies and wife-beaters. They are often surprised to hear we have a team of five in our Miyazaki office and we generally work regular hours. If you are ever down this way, feel free to pop into our office, which is fifty metres from the beach in the picture above at Aoshima. Just be careful though, because if you come on a Wednesday, you will find that it is undies and wife-beater (singlet) day in our office.
“It must be hard working in recruitment remotely”
The next comment is often something along these lines. I have only ever recruited remotely, so I don’t know any different, but it many ways it would be an advantage to be in Tokyo full-time. It is pretty hard to run out for a quick cup of coffee with a candidate when they have a slot open up suddenly, and we miss out on random face to face meetings by not being there all the time. The chance of being introduced to a possible new candidate in a pub is extremely remote when the pub you drink at is more than 1000 kilometres way from Ginza, Akasaka or Ebisu. It is also quite hard to time trips to coincide with Recruitment Industry events.
“So, why not work from Tokyo, then?”
In short, balance. The longest commute for any of our staff is about 11 minutes by car or 25 by bicycle (Our office is close to the station, but out here in the inaka, there is sometimes a two hour gap between trains). For me personally, I can surf before work for two hours and still be in the office by 9 a.m. If the waves are really good, I can go out in the day and adjust my work schedule around that. With mobile access to the database, we can work from anywhere with an internet connection. We tend to work regular hours in the office (usually everyone is out of the office before 5:30 p.m.), and then everyone is available by phone or email when necessary in the evening. Our staff who have battled the commute in the big cities in previous jobs say the relaxed trip to work helps them to stay fresh and concentrate more as we get to the end of the week.
“How can you be successful recruiting remotely?”
The simple answer to recruiting remotely is to have a niche, build up a knowledge about your market, stick at it, and build meaningful relationships over time. We work hard, and when we visit Tokyo, we do 7-8 meetings per day. If we visit Tokyo once a month for three days that equals twenty to twenty five face to face meetings.
In my case, I try to work the KPIs that one of the larger international firms use. There are two reasons to this; the first is to make sure I keep focused doing enough work to get a consistent flow of candidates. The other is that candidates from search firms of often wary of going into a KPI driven environment. It helps to be able to explain the KPIs and how they help me to bill consistently. Going back to the point in the second section about the difficulties of not being in Tokyo, working remotely has the benefit of focusing you and getting you on the phone more. You also need to make sure the knowledge and service provided to clients and candidates makes up for the lack of face to face time.
In the end, recruiting remotely is not massively different to regular recruitment. Being organised, focused and having good client and candidate relationships is important wherever you are in this industry. See you in the surf!
Simon