How can university students get a job in your country? Japan has a unique job hunting custom. Companies decide the job hunting schedule each year, affecting students significantly. In this year, companies started to hold seminars from March 1st and will be allowed to fully begin selection procedures, such as interviews and written exams, from June. http://www.nippon.com/en/behind/l10171/
You can learn more about the Japanese job hunting tradition from here: http://www.nippon.com/en/column/g00365/
I would appreciate it if you could share your countries’ cases about job hunting.
Wow! I had no idea Japan had such an organized job search system. In the U.S., job searching varies greatly depending on various factors.
One of them is the career services office. Many students consider the quality and success of a university’s career center when they decide which school to attend. SIPA’s OCS, for example, I think is pretty good because they email out listings of jobs every week and have a variety of services they provide. Yet, ultimately, it is the student’s responsibility to use those resources, and there is no set scheduling system for job searches.
Job searches also depend on the industry and your degree. If you’re interested in government jobs, you want to apply in the summer or fall prior to graduating, since you’ll need the extra time to attain a security clearance. Summer internship searches with the government start this early for the same reason. Big consulting firms tend to be very regimented in their full-time recruiting process. Some consulting firms won’t hire new graduates unless they were summer associates (summer interns). MBAs start the process in the fall before graduating. Other masters degrees, like MIA/MPAs, are normally not sought until late fall or early spring.
So, it really depends! And it is usually 100% up to the student to learn the applicable processes.
What I thought was interesting in one of the articles was that some companies will try to offer tea or send candidates to resorts for training to entice them to accept their offer (or prevent them from accepting other companies offers). For some reason, I just didn’t imagine Japanese companies doing this. Many companies in the U.S. also like to “wine and dine” candidates to convince them to accept job offers. I experienced this for the first time with Deloitte concerning their summer associate position, and they did not hold back. It was quite a day and night.
Thanks for sharing Sho! It is interesting to learn that Japan has such an organized system for job hunting – perhaps this should be replicated in developing countries with high rates of youth unemployment due to external societal factors. In Pakistan, especially in public universities, students receive little guidance for job-hunting from universities or potential employers themselves. This has devastating consequences for the majority of the graduates who cannot afford to attend private schools (Private university students are more savvy, have access to recruiter events and a significant proportion even get white collared jobs overseas due to the networks they gain at university). Public university students, who usually come from the lower or middle class, end up remaining unemployed for long periods of time or are underemployed, which I think has contributed largely to low levels of higher education enrollment as a whole in the country – why not look for paid work after high school and support one’s family rather than invest time and money in a higher education and not know what to do with that education.
Thank you Sho and Chaoyi for sharing your experience on how graduating students in your respective countries approach job hunting. I noticed that both Japan and China are similar to a certain extent, as both have a strong domestic market that aims to attract graduates to work for them. In the case of Singapore, because we are a much smaller country in comparison, we are forced by circumstances to look outwards and internationally.
Similarly to China, Singapore also has career development platforms such as Glints. It is a career discovery and development platform that provides students and employers in Singapore with lots of information on how to find a perfect match in terms of career opportunities.
More info here:
https://glints.sg
Thanks for bringing this topic. Job hunting is a very important topic for students and students pay attention to the job market much earlier than ten years ago when I graduated. I think China has the similar situation. The companies negotiate with the university to decide a date for campus recruitment talk and they decide specific dates to give tests and interviews. We have a specific section on Fudan forum called “Job Plaza”. Students can make a job hunting schedule, exchange the experiences, and inquire about the result. We also have the Student Career Development Education Service Center to manage and provide related service. Another very important point I want to raise is in China, some universities also provide the seed money to help students to start their own business. I do feel that it is one of the most important services that the university should pay attention to.