What was important to me was a work style that was different from a typical Japanese company . I aimed to change my job to a foreign company where I could travel to Southeast Asia and have a high possibility of being stationed there.
A candidate, who successfully found a job via CareerCross, told us about his job search!
Interview
Former Job : Technical Consultant at a foreign consulting company
Current Job : Technical Consultant at a foreign-affiliated internet company
Age: Under 30
Applications : 8 companies
Scouts : 5 companies
Job hunting period : 4 months
Job offers : 2 companies
CareerCross : Please tell us about your previous job.
Successful Candidate : I joined my previous company in a technology consultant role as a new graduate. I was helping customers implement their systems, doing operation maintenance, checking for errors , and other system engineering-like tasks in parallel.
CareerCross : Your previous job was with a foreign company as a new graduate, and now your new job is also with a foreign company. Were you hoping to work for a foreign company?
Successful Candidate : I didn’t have “foreign company” in mind, but that’s what I ended up doing. All the companies I applied to were foreign companies. I was originally very interested in working overseas.
At my previous job, I had the opportunity to go on business trips overseas, but it was difficult to be stationed in a large company with a large number of people who could move there. The new workplace is relatively medium-sized, so the chances of overseas business trips and moving abroad are high, which is one of its attractive points.
CareerCross : Is there anything else that appealed to you?
Successful Candidate : Yes. The current company’s internal career change system is also very attractive to me because it seems to offer flexible career options.
CareerCross : Is there a country overseas that you would like to work in?
Successful Candidate : I am interested in Southeast Asia. The Asian management division of my new company is located in a Southeast Asian country and the possibility of being stationed in that country was attractive to me.
CareerCross : Your annual salary will be lower with this new job. Please tell us about that as well.
Successful Candidate : I told the HR from the beginning that I didn’t want to focus on the annual salary, but rather on the possibility of going overseas and whether the work style was suited to me. I was willing to accept a lower annual salary.
CareerCross : Were there any other options besides the company you decided to work for?
Successful Candidate : I also considered a job offer from a foreign-affiliated corporation in a Southeast Asian country. Working there was very attractive and the benefits were good, but the work was a little out of line with what I wanted to do, so I decided to pass.
I chose this company because the job description was more in line with what I wanted to do and there was a possibility of overseas assignments and business trips.
CareerCross : What made you decide that you wanted to work overseas?
Successful Candidate : It wasn’t a very long term experience, but I went to a country in Europe as an exchange student for a little less than a year, and when I was in junior high school, I also went to a boarding school in an other country of Europe for about three weeks as a language student.
I had the opportunity to study abroad, and I wanted to go abroad even after I entered the workforce.
CareerCross : When you studied abroad, you were in a European country, but for your new job, you would like to work in Southeast Asia. Please tell us how you became interested in Southeast Asia.
Successful Candidate : There’re two reasons. One is when I was in India on a business trip for my previous job. I really liked the way the local staff worked in India.
The other reason is that I have often traveled to Southeast Asia since I was a university student, and I thought it would be a good cultural fit for me and I would like to live there.
CareerCross : What kind of impression did you have of our company’s recruitment website? Was there anything that changed your impression after using our site?
Successful Candidate : I had the impression that there were many jobs available overseas. When I actually used the service, I noticed that there were many English jobs in Japan as well. I had the impression that there were only a limited number of overseas jobs, so I was glad that I could look at a wide range of domestic jobs as well.
Thoughts after the interview
I got the impression that the reason for his success was that he had a clear idea of how he wanted to work, and he pushed forward to achieve his goal without hesitation. In the interview, the words “overseas business trip” and “move abroad” came up repeatedly, and I could feel his power to go to Southeast Asia. He received two job offers from companies with the possibility of him being stationed in Southeast Asia, which gave him more options to choose from.