More than 70 percent of the bilingual professionals in Japan say they would require pay raise of at least 10 percent when changing jobs. On the other hand, it was learned that less than 20 percent of companies had hiked pay to respond to the shortage of talent.

These findings are according to recently released white paper by Robert Walters Japan, titled “Recruiting Professionals in a Candidate Short Market.” This paper was compiled from results of a survey conducted by the company in June on 180 HR managers at companies in Japan and South Korea and 1,484 bilingual professionals with specialised skills.

Many of the companies say that in lieu of paying higher salaries, they tried to cope with the shortage of talent over the past year through employee training, reshuffling work duties among their offices or instituting transfers from overseas offices. In addition, nearly half the companies loosened their hiring requirements.

More than 80 percent of the HR managers say they feel it is difficult recruiting suitably qualified professionals. The survey also revealed the effects of the shortage on businesses. These include lower productivity (cited by 38 percent of respondents), failing to meet deadlines/struggling to address client companies’ expectations (32 percent) and reduced morale among employees (16 percent).

See: Japan’s Talent Mismatch Ranks the Most Severe in Asia Pacific

Drawing comparison between Japan and South Korea, bilingual talent market, the survey finds:

• The shortage of bilingual talent was felt more acutely by recruitment managers in Japan than in South Korea. Even so, the ratio of South Korean companies that had already set up measures to respond to future shortages of human resources was 44 percent, higher than their Japanese counterparts at 35 percent.
• Among the South Korean personnel managers, 32 percent had raised employees’ standard pay and 16 percent improved benefits over the previous years to recruit suitably qualified professionals. Japanese HR managers implementing the same measures were 19 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
• As for the appeal of switching jobs, 71 percent of bilingual professionals in Japan cited higher pay than at their current workplaces. That ratio exceeded the 52 percent recorded for their South Korean counterparts.
• Nearly 70 percent of both the Japanese and South Korean bilingual professionals say they are attracted to the prospect of having a new position or doing challenging work. Around 30 percent of them have a sense of dissatisfaction over lack of rewards at their current workplaces.
• Bilingual professionals who say they find job security attractive accounted for around half of respondents in both countries: 52 percent in South Korea and 46 percent in Japan.
• More of the South Korean bilingual professionals (47 percent) than their Japanese counterparts (38 percent) say they feel absolutely no resistance to changing jobs.

Nevertheless, one in five of the personnel managers had no plans to consider measures to address talent shortage in the future. Therefore, they are required to accurately grasp the hopes and desires of the human resources they want to hire while adopting a flexible stance in their recruitment activities.

Also read: Japanese wages post 0.6% rise, steepest in a decade