Personnel perspectives; Three views of the human resources process: candidate, recruiter, employer.

To get good graduates, we are very active on campuses in Japan and overseas. For example we have a stall at the Boston Career Forum to try and recruit bi-lingual Japanese who have graduated from universities in the US. At the higher level, we have managed to keep staff by creating opportunities for them to develop within the company that rival what they could achieve if they set up on their own. We also allow a greater degree of freedom than at other firms. Every year we recruit 100 new graduates and 150 experienced people. We try hard to cultivate a team culture, interesting opportunities and an accumulated store of knowledge that will persuade people to both join us, and stay with us. We have also recently started to spend on boosting our brand recognition. Additionally, current employees are encouraged to introduce good people to the firm.

Have you used recruitment companies?

We handle graduate recruitment ourselves but at the mid-career stage we use both matching services and executive search. This helps to filter applications and, where we use headhunters, we can try and pick up some narrowly targeted and highly beneficial lateral hires. We have a good long-term relationship with one headhunting firm although we have occasionally tried other outfits.

What difficulties are there when using a headhunter?

Often there is a salary issue. You have to offer a good incentive to get the people you want but it is important to be sensitive to the ambitions of existing employees, particularly in Japan. Therefore, we try not to use headhunters too often although it is vital that we do occasionally make moves to hire key people from outside the company.

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1. Faux Boxing: Headhunters may go to events and place an attractive box in the corner with a "Win A Car!" slogan on the side. This entices people to put their business cards in the allotted slot in hope of winning a beautiful silver Mercedes. For the recuiter, this makes for a successful and anonymous round of name collecting.

2. Social Engineering: Most recruitment companies have a clause against what is euphemistically known as "social engineering." This is also known as fraud/impersonation/deception. A headhunter may ring a company pretending to be a client, customer, friend, relative; anything to keep their identity secret and stay on the phone. Although companies may endorse this clause, a large number of them may make a note in their training manual that "yes, it is illegal but yes, you have to do it."

3. Unknown Number: A headhunter will make sure that any calls made cannot be traced back to them. However, some companies may be savvy enough to decode the "unknown number" and trace the caller. To deal with this problem, some headhunters route the phone system through a foreign country to make absolutely sure that their track is hidden.

4. Trawling: Once a headhunter knows the formula of a company's email address (for example, A.Bee@companyC.com), then it is possible to shoot off mass emails with random names. If any get through, the reader is confronted with a familiar sounding email such as, "We have heard great things about you and would like a meeting ..."

5. Mapping: A similar method to trawling, mapping is commonly used via the phone system. Mapping entails finding out the standard part of the phone number before punching in random extension numbers. This usually takes place in the nocturnal hours so that a long list of names can be compiled from answering machine messages.

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Compiled through confidential interviews with experienced headhunters working in the Japanese market

By Anna Kitanaka