HDE, Inc. which develops and sells products in the e-mails/cloud security field for companies. It is a proven IT company that has deployed more than 7000 other companies. Such a company has become a hot topic recently, along with the hiring of overseas students. This time we asked Mr. Takahashi of the Human Resources Department about its global recruitment.

Please tell us the details about how you started to hire international students.

At first, we were suffering from the fact that we cannot have enough attention from talented students because the company’s recognition was low. We have been doing new graduates-recruitments and we were using more than 30 different recruitment companies, but I could not get the talent that I was expecting. Also, as our services specialize in cloud products, English correspondence has become essential for business partners. Putting these reasons together, I then thought about how to recruit the excellences that are able to speak English from abroad.

Therefore, I visited Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia from summer to fall in 2014. I directly met local students through student organizations, business contests, local recruitment agents, etc. and visited the university’s career center to hear more stories. Listening to their stories, I probed into the level of engineers and their degree of familiarity with Japan.

Thereafter, when I visited Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, I was asked “Do you want to come to a job fair next month?” About 20,000 students from both Indonesia and abroad would get together in the event and 100 companies would participate but there are no companies from Japan.

I was surprised by the sudden invitation, and as I participated, 3,500 flyers disappeared soon and there were about 300 intern entries on that day alone. So I felt the response greatly and decided to start hiring overseas students directly and held great expectations about it.

Could you tell us the recruitment procedure?

For overseas student recruitment, we have studensts experience the Internship “HDE Global Internship Program”. It is a 4 – 8 weeks program for international students wishing to be engineers both from Japan and all over the world to experience practical application development. As the language used in the program is English, Japanese skills are not required. The company will bear the expenses for the program including travel and staying expenses and visa. Since 2014 there have been over 4000 entries from overseas so far, and about 50 students participated in the program.

The passage rate of 50 people out of 4000 is very difficult. What kind recruitment standard do you have?

Our company has adopted the “100 out of 100 full score” high standard several years ago. In the past, our company’s name recognition was low, so the talent that we wanted didn’t apply to our company. But with that the company’s organizational capabilities were not rising. So we took a risk by raising our standards and decided to hire 100 full-score talented personnel. We daringly have high level standard for all recruitment including global recruitment.

Specifically, we are looking at these three points: to have outstanding technical ability, to be able to challenge changing the world with technology, and to learn and grow by oneself. It is also important to agree with the business and way of thinking of HDE, why it must be HDE, and whether you can work with HDE and create a flourishing image of each other.

Do you have any support for foreign employees to get used to life in Japan and your company?

Because Japan itself is not globalized, there are many cases where the procedure necessary for making contracts are not compatible with foreigners. For example, visa applications, bank accounts, mobile phones, hospital procedures etc. Our company provides support of such things as much as possible.

Also, regarding language, we are trying to eliminate the language barrier by introducing English as the official language within our company. We are also working on in-company Japanese employees to learn English through on-line English learning and study abroad in Cebu. In addition, we are doing “lunch parades”, which consist to go to lunch with newly-hired foreign employees and company members. The company bears the lunch fee. We believe that the language barrier will gradually become lower by positively communicating with foreign employees in this way.

What kind of screening do you have for the student recruitment in Japan?

While we do interview recruitment of new graduates throughout the year, we also have internship selection for business development called “Overseas Business Trip Internship”. It is a program that takes overseas business trips with HDE employees for about a week, in order to experience overseas business. We will cover all travel and accommodation expenses. Since you have to make proposals and projects by yourself from the selection stage, it is a pretty dense content that you work at the same level as your employees. Therefore, we can see whether students and our company are matched over each other over time. Both Japanese and foreigners are welcome.

(Interview: Kanako Arata, Translation: Ilaria Ester Macclocca)