Ranked the third-largest global economy by GDP and the fourth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP) in the World Economic Forum’s report for three consecutive years, Japan can be called a rising global business powerhouse. This also explains why the nation has been attracting many multinational companies (MNCs) for decades: its market size, purchasing power, and growth potential. Even the Japanese consumer base is sophisticated, knowledgeable, and has a deep understanding and appreciation for brands—making MNCs view Japan as ground-zero for market penetration (or market creation) in the APAC region that can offer a hefty return on investment margins.

Consequently, such trends are now, more than ever, leading to the growing number of executive-level open positions in Japan for global companies wishing to establish their firm footing in the country. But setting up a business in Japan is not without its challenges. Japan has one of the fastest aging populations in the world, and so the country has a scanty talent pool. On top of that, hiring in Japan can be tricky. Unlike many other countries in North America and Europe, where MNCs hire through a direct sourcing arm, they need to go through a recruitment firm in Japan as candidates are less responsive and less visible online. But in doing so, the MNCs also have to bear one of the highest executive search fees in the world—30-35 percent of the candidate’s first-year total compensation, to be precise. Despite the high cost, such recruitment firms are important because they act as the middle ground to source the right bilingual candidates for businesses. The hiring trend of late, however, is greatly shifting now from just bilingual to bi-cultural and multi-cultural candidates.

This particular situation calls for adept assistance. Enter Evander Group.

A leading premium executive search firm based in Tokyo, Japan, Evander Group is steadfastly resolving not only the linguistic but also the cultural differences in the Japanese (and Asian) recruitment space. The company, on that front, presents itself as a consulting firm rather than just an off-the-shelf executive recruitment company, thereby ensuring that a client’s specific recruitment needs and issues are discussed and handled with transparency and maximum efforts. Owing to such an approach, within just six years of its inception, Evander Group has built a strong, trusting relationship with all its clients by being an extension of clients’ core culture and corporate values to hire the right talent.

“We make this possible by not just assessing the CV and skillsets of a candidate during our executive assessment but also taking a candidate’s personal and cultural background into equal consideration,” says William Kawabata Hall, co-founder and managing director of Evander Group. In addition, Arlo Brown, co-founder and managing director of Evander Group, emphasizes, “Our differentiation lies in our strong research capabilities. There are many recruitment firms in Japan primarily sourcing active candidates. However, we differentiate ourselves by using our strong research capabilities to identify passive candidates who are not necessarily looking for jobs right now.”
The Roots of Excellence

One of the biggest differentiating factors of the firm stems from the mixed ethnic backgrounds of Evander Group’s leadership team. Both the co-founders, William Kawabata Hall and Arlo Brown, have parents of Japanese lineage. “We were also born and raised in Japan,” shares Hall. “This gives us the upper hand in understanding the pain points of both the worlds and leveraging those insights to approach the recruitment issues,” says Hall. On that note, Hall believes that his company, Evander Group, is probably the only executive recruitment firm that has two founders/leaders that are fully bilingual and bi-cultural, which leaves no room for communication gaps.

Illuminating the Path to a Bilingual Workforce

This unique nature of the company’s leadership team is what also constitutes the backbone of the company’s workflow. Their international backgrounds help understand the candidates’ true feelings throughout the recruitment process. For instance, Brown cites, “A ‘yes,’ doesn’t always mean a yes in Japan. We feel we are quite adept at understanding those nuances and navigating cultural differences. In addition, our strong network, built over the years, helps us achieve a lot of success.”

That way, Evander Group truly becomes an extension of its client’s internal talent acquisition and organizational development team to assist them in not only finding the right candidates with the right skill sets but also guiding them through change management processes so that the client’s firm gains a strong foothold in the Japanese market. To that end, Evander Group starts all of its collaboration by comprehensively understanding the nature of challenges related to recruitment in Japan and employs its expert team to implement strategic methodologies to address them. Evander Group’s experts also carry out multiple discussions with the client’s global and regional leadership teams to pinpoint the firm’s long-term and short-term business goals. With that understanding, Evander Group then dives deep into noting down the individual specifications, the non-negotiable aspects of the job descriptions, and the cultural nuances required for the open positions. Later, through extensive market research, Evander Group finds and selects suitable candidate profiles which are then presented to the clients to help them discover the ideal talent for their positions. In this endeavor, the company follows a systematic approach throughout the recruitment lifecycle, where the candidates and clients are duly updated at all times, thereby giving added clarity about the deal negotiation, references, and finally closing a candidate for a job role. “Throughout the process, we also try to gain as much insight on the company’s market reputation among candidates or any other business-critical information to pass on to their leadership team,” adds Hall.

Riding on the coattails of these wellthought- out recruitment services, many MNCs—ranging from the consumer sector to financial services and insurance space—are witnessing tangible benefits. One such client is a leading multinational consumer tech company that needed help in establishing its name in the Japanese market. The client was looking for an English-speaking executive with very niche industry experience. In this case, Evander Group took a turn from being a latent recruitment firm and presented the client with a proposal providing data on the market landscape within the competitor space—and showed the client clear-cut data of the specific talent pool, proposing to hire talent competent in the field rather than someone with good command of English. “While we presented the client with a list of 30 probable candidates, only four among them could speak in English,” mentions Hall. “We recommended the client to relax the English-speaking skill of the candidate in this regard since we anticipated there can be cases where a well-versed English speaker might not be the strongest candidate for the role to produce desired results and relationships for the client,” notes Hall.



Walking on a thin line between what is demanded versus what is ideal is where Evander Group cements its cornerstone and brings its uniqueness to the Japanese recruitment landscape. In a space where online hiring portals can just do the job, a consultancy firm like Evander Group can make organizations understand the importance of having an executive recruitment partner to identify and introduce top talent—sometimes even with minimal English skills—for an executive position so they can greatly contribute to building a strong foundation for the organization in Japan.

This is but one of the many success stories that Evander Group has penned over the years. Multinational companies across the world trust the firm’s expertise today to bolster their recruitment operations, even in the dire conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, Evander Group is focused on expanding the business further to other verticals to fulfill and meet the demands of all its clients. The company also aims to start supporting executive recruitment for Japanese firms finding top talent in Japan HQ and for their international branches overseas. But amid all these growth plans, being a people-first company, Evander Group wants to ensure that its own employees are happy and content too, “because they are the core building blocks and foundation of our business, and we wouldn’t be here without them. Corporate culture is very important for us, like a family,” concludes Hall in an assured tone.