The admissions team get a lot of questions about the job market in Japan for international students.

Well, the latest news coming from the Japan Business Federation is a step in the right direction for Japanese companies to attract international talent.

Japan’s largest business lobby, also known as the Japan Business Federation, will abolish the guidelines for university students joining the workplace in spring 2021.

The decision comes after Hiroaki Nakanishi, chairman of the business lobby, expressed an intention to end the practice amid a need for globalization as the practice has been deemed too rigid and outdated.

A distinctive feature of Japan’s shūshoku katsudō (job-hunting activity), shūkatsu for short, is that the recruiting schedule at major corporations is set in advance every year based on a consensus among the government, businesses, and academia.

The shūkatsu process begins for most students in their junior years, which is when they start attending career seminars at their schools and elsewhere. In their senior years, they submit applications for job openings announced by companies and go through the selection process aimed at winning naitei, promises of postgraduation employment. After graduating in March, they start their new jobs in April, the first month of the fiscal and academic year.

This has led to problems where the major corporations belonging to Keidanren were bound by the revised guidelines, but non-member foreign affiliates were not, and they snapped up promising students before the big companies started recruiting.

There have been promising signs in recent years with the sheer growth of international students and Prime Minister Abe's initiatives to keep global talent in Japan.

The number of foreign nationals working in Japan reached its highest-ever level in October 2017 at 1,278,670, according to a study by the labor ministry.

The latest move to shake up conventional labor management and human capital development practices in Japan should help ease the the country's labor shortage and bring much needed greater workforce diversity.