Local firms beating big rivals to win Asia’s talent
Municipal programmes to help businesses compete are bearing fruit
Municipal governments in Japan are working to attract information technology engineers from across Asia to support local businesses faced with fierce competition from their more powerful, big-city competitors.
Projects designed to help small and midsize companies lacking the resources and reach to recruit information technology engineers have become increasingly valuable, although an unwillingness to experiment is preventing many local governments from engaging with overseas talent.
Eyemovic Inc, an IT company based in the city of Matsuyama, is one of the companies that needed help, which in its case was provided by Ehime prefecture in hiring a Nepalese engineer last spring.
Founded in 2005, Eyemovic operates with a workforce of about 50 and has branch offices in Kagawa, Kochi and Tokushima – the other three of the four prefectures on the western main island of Shikoku – as well as in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.
“Competition with the big IT companies to recruit engineers is extremely fierce,” said Kenichiro Morimoto, the 45-year-old president of the regionally based software provider.
Recent Cabinet Secretariat data showed some 60 per cent of IT engineers in Japan were in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and almost 90 per cent of domestic companies surveyed said they were struggling to hire the people they needed.
Although recruitment of Japan-based foreign personnel is a solution to the problem, most companies lack the necessary know-how to create such opportunities on their own.
While India is known as an IT powerhouse, Indian engineers are much in demand around the world. The Ehime government therefore looked towards India’s neighbour, Nepal.
“Although Nepal has an abundance of competent IT engineers, competition to employ them is not very intense,” an Ehime official said. “So we thought that local companies have a chance.”
By paying for Japanese language education and other expenses in Nepal, the Ehime government has helped 17 local companies employ or offer jobs to 29 Nepalese engineers. Launched in 2022, the programme to pair foreign IT engineers with companies is expected to end this financial year.
An official at the prefectural government’s industrial human resources division said it is “looking to create ties with Nepal and develop an environment in which companies in the prefecture can recruit on their own”.
In related developments, the Toyama prefectural government is supporting local companies in building relationships with universities in Vietnam, while firms in Sapporo in the northern prefecture of Hokkaido have been hiring engineers from countries such as Bangladesh thanks to subsidies provided by the city office.
However, not many municipalities across Japan are eager to push forward with such initiatives. A nationwide Kyodo News survey found only 20 per cent of local governments were working to promote acquisition of overseas IT talent, with many reluctant to introduce such programmes citing a lack of know-how and “the language barrier” as reasons.
Japan ranked 43rd out of 64 economies in the 2023 World Talent Ranking by the International Institute for Management Development, based on metrics such as the ability to attract human resources in Japan and abroad.