The Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry will start a joint online service Tuesday to link job-seeking university students set to graduate next spring and small and midsize companies looking to hire them.
The ministry and the chamber will launch a Web site named Dream Match Project, to be operated by Recruit Co., for the service. It will act as an online meeting place for job-hunting students, who are having extreme difficulty finding jobs amid the current economic slump, and small and midsize employers who cannot spend much money on recruiting and are struggling to hire talented young workers.
The ministry and the chamber aim to eliminate mismatches between companies and potential employees. Student users will be able to input such data as the industries and locations where they desire to work, and the Web site will display small and midsize companies matching those conditions. At students' request, firms will e-mail such information as the schedules of their recruiting sessions.
The service would also help presidents of small and midsize companies meet students in person when the presidents are on business trips to such locations as Tokyo.
The project is designed to help small and midsize companies recruit people newly graduated from universities when the firms start looking for employees after many major companies have finished their recruitment in May.
Students currently have limited means of collecting information about companies in areas they are not originally from.
The government's regional labor bureaus organize recruiting sessions for such companies and students. But students have to pay their own travel and hotel expenses, and it is difficult for students to spend a long time with individual companies.
Students also often complain it is difficult to attend multiple sessions because it takes time to travel from one place to another.
Using the planned Web site, students in Tokyo will be able to obtain information about companies in Sapporo or Fukuoka without incurring travel expenses.
The ministry and the chamber plan to post information of about 2,500 companies with 300 or fewer employees. No registration fee will be charged students or companies.
The Web site will continue to operate through January, and the ministry and the chamber expect 1,000 students to find jobs through it.
According to observers, an increasing number of university students want to join major companies or find stable jobs.
"Students who witnessed how hard job-hunting was last year are likely to expand their target range," a Recruit official said. "By providing more contacts with small and midsize companies, we aim to increase student choices."
As the first step, Recruit plans to recommend the about 600,000 students who use its job-hunting service register with the Web site, to help eliminate mismatches by providing more contacts between students and small and midsize companies.
According to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry and other sources, only 80 percent of university graduates this spring had secured jobs as of February. This was 6.3 percentage points lower than in the same month in the previous year and the worst figure since 2000.
Recruit said the ratio of job offers to job seekers for university and graduate students who will graduate next spring is 0.47 in major companies with 5,000 or more employees.
However, the ratio in small and midsize companies is 4.41, indicating that the smaller companies are facing a dire labor shortage.
Observers say small and midsize companies are not active in releasing job information, and students tend to shun small and midsize firms, irrespective of the jobs they actually offer.
(May. 17, 2010)
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/T100516001767.htm
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