WORKING CONDITIONS AND THE LABOUR MARKET
Vol.33-No.07 July 1,1994
Recruiting Plans for New Grads for Fiscal 1995
In Japan, corporations recruit and employ particularly new school graduates as regular employees and these constitute the backbone of corporate society. The practice of hiring every year the bulk of employees as new school graduates, dubbed "new school graduates employment," is considered to be a major event for both students and businesses. The hiring of new school graduates means that employers recruit students graduating in March of the following year. To recruit these prospective graduates, employers conduct various activities in the year before they graduate. On the other hand, students carry out their job-search activity in the same year while pursuing their studies. Normally, students receive promises of employment from the firm during the year and enter employment immediately after they leave school the following year.
The emerging trend in industrial circles is to reduce the number of new graduates to be hired in fiscal 1995. Hiring policies were also austere in fiscal 1994. The business daily, Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japan Economic Journal), conducted questionnaire-based survey on recruiting plans for the year starting in April 1995 at major firms. The survey, conducted among 1,479 firms, of which 723 replied, showed new recruits will decrease by 18.1 percent, the fourth consecutive yearly decline and the first decline of this duration since statistics began in 1978. Also, hiring will show a two-digit drop for the third year in a row.
By educational background, new employment of junior-college and technical-college graduates will drop by 32.5 percent from a year earlier, and high-school graduate recruitment will decline by 24.3 percent. Both figures are double-digit declines for the second straight year. Meanwhile, the overall number of college-graduate recruits will dip 9.3 percent from the year before, showing a smaller drop than the 25.3 percent decline of a year earlier. The number of new recruits in technical fields will drop by 12.8 percent from the year before while hiring of those for administrative jobs will fall by 3.9 percent.
By industry, manufacturing firms will reduce college-graduate recruits by 13.8 percent, while non-manufacturing firms will make a 5.8 percent cut in new staff, showing a small decline from the previous year. Of 19 industries in the manufacturing sector, firms in 17, excluding office equipment and miscellaneous, will decrease the number of new recruits. Paper and pulp companies are going ahead with restructuring measures of themselves, such as mergers, and will make drastic reductions in hiring of new graduates. They will hire 30.9 percent fewer graduates than the year before. Nonferrous, other metal as well as of rubber manufacturers, dogged by structural recession, will also slash the number of new recruits. Nonferrous and other metal firms will employ 35.2 percent fewer graduates than last year while rubber manufacturers will hire 53.5 percent fewer. In the non-manufacturing sector (24 fields), meanwhile, companies in 9 types of businesses, including real estate and housing and communication, have decided to boost the number of new recruits by 5.6 percent from the previous year. Many firms, particularly major ones, such as automakers and electrical machinery makers, remain cautious in their recruiting plans for next spring. Their decision about recruitment in the coming months will possibly call for further reductions.
Another survey, conducted by Toyokeizai Shimposha among 2,110 stock exchange listed firms, found only 4.4 percent responding they will boost or slightly increase the number of new recruits. On the other hand, 20 percent said they will reduce new employment to some extent.
According to a questionnaire administered by the Mainichi Shimbun to presidents of 50 major corporations, 74 percent predicted employment condition for new graduates will "be severer." Thus the issue of job-hunting for new school graduates seems to be increasingly serious.
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