Majority of Japan’s senior students are rejecting job offers

More than half of the university seniors polled in Japan have turned down one or more job offers by the end October amid a nationwide labour shortage, a report said.

According to The Mainichi, 92.1 percent of the 1,529 seniors surveyed received job offers ahead of their graduation next March.

Recruit Career Co., which has been conducting the annual survey since 2012 found that 64.6 percent of the seniors rejected at least one job offer, up 3.8 points from the previous year and the highest

Recruitment by companies in Japan generally starts months before senior students graduate, with jobs commencing as soon as April, which is the start of the business year.

The surveyors said the number of rejections tends to rise in tandem with Japan’s recovering economy as more positions become available for fresh graduates.

Can we quit our jobs and move to Japan

— nathan fielder fan (@Carmenistaa) November 10, 2017

“Since companies made more offers than usual this year, an increasing number of students landed two or more jobs, pushing up the proportion of rejections,” a Recruit Career official was quoted as saying.

The official added some students who had merely one offer turned down the opportunity to look for better job prospects, owing to improved market conditions.

The latest number of job offer rejections has risen sharply since the survey began in 2012 when the figure stood at 45.9 percent. The country had seen job opportunities take a plunge in 2008 following the global financial crisis.

And while the job opportunities for the graduates are aplenty, many small and medium-sized companies said they faced challenges getting fresh graduates to work for them.

Recruit Career Co.’s research division said there were currently 1.78 jobs available for every student due to graduate in the spring of 2018, some 1.4 times the figure in 2013.

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