Why I Scrapped My Japanese Résumé

I have been living in Japan since 1997.

I went to college here, and after finishing both my undergraduate and graduate courses in 2004, I came back to Tokyo and started to work right away.

As of last week, I have decided that I will no longer seek jobs in the future using a Japanese-language résumé. From now on, it will be English-only.

The reason in simple: I want to weed out companies that are trapped in a backwards culture. This isn't 100% perfect, but I believe that "this company can't read résumés in English" is a close enough proxy for "this company does not have a modern, international-oriented mentality, their managers can't think out of the box and is constrained by obtuse, Japanese workplace tradition (and they most likely use fax on a daily basis to conduct their business)".

Case in point, two weeks ago I had a job interview arranged with Recruit, a large and renown Japanese corporation. The instructions regarding the place to meet with the interviewer within their huge building were ambiguous, I had to "commute" between elevators to reach the floor, and was a few minutes late. But it didn't matter: the interviewer was even later.

As soon as we sat, the interviewer began asking:

Why did you leave company A?

(my first employeer).

I was barely longer than one year at that company, so I answered to the best of my knowledge. Then she proceeded:

Why did you leave company B?

(my second employer). And immediately after I answered, without moving her eyes away from her laptop's screen,

Why did you leave company C?

(you guessed it: my third employer).

At this point I thought to myself "this was a mistake. I shoudn' be here". I managed to contain myself until the end, and left politely following interview protocol.

As soon as I got back home, I e-mailed the recruiter and told him that –regardless of the result– I didn't want to have anything to do with that company and to please cancel my application immediately.

For most of my adult life, I haven't been the person I want to be. I do have a past, nobody is perfect. I was young, and I was short-tempered, lazy, whiney, unprepared. In many respects, I'm still not the person I want to be. But the most important change did take place, around seven years ago, when I decided to stop blaming my situation on external factors and took responsibility to change the things that are under my control, starting with myself. I stopped smoking. I began to work out. I adopted a forward attitude of achieving things by myself. I quit my comfortable-but-low-pay job and went on to look for a challenge.

I won't be judged for what I was fifteen years ago, or even ten. I have a portfolio on GitHub. I have several apps on the store, and significant reputation on Stack Overflow. The companies that matter look at that. Or at least they ask for specific milestones and achievements at previous companies. At most, they'll ask why you left a previous employer only if you were there for less than a year.

Recruit, and others like them, will get the memo when they realize the can't compete in talent acquisition. But it will be too late for the big and slow dinosaurs, and more than a few will likely go extinct.