Do stressed millennials spell end for ‘shukatsu’, Japan’s notorious graduate recruitment process?
- An ageing population, dwindling workforce and changing attitudes to life-work balance force a rethink of Japan’s infamously tough job-hunting season
- So stressful is ‘shukatsu’ that many students say it has driven them to consider suicide
For Japan’s stressed-out students, it’s an extra pressure they could do without: the moment reality bites and they must spend half a year trying to convince the nation’s most respected corporations they are worthy of a job.
The demands of shukatsu, as Japan’s graduate recruitment season is known, are notoriously punishing.
Every year, beginning in March, hundreds of thousands of the country’s brightest young minds embark on the intense six-month process in which those seeking the most coveted positions will be expected to attend countless seminars, briefings, hiring sessions and job interviews if they are to succeed.
The stakes are high, with about eight in 10 graduates finding jobs this way last year, according to the education ministry.
It’s a very stressful time for students, because there’s a prevailing idea that there’s only one chance to get into a company
But so too are the pressures, with one in five students telling a study by the suicide prevention group Lifelink that the process had caused them to consider killing themselves.
“It’s a very stressful time for students, because there’s a prevailing idea that there’s only one chance to get into a company,” recalls Yumi Mizuno, a freelance translator based in Tokyo, of her own experience of shukatsu, which she and many of her peers dreaded.