MLC's Graduate Recruitment Site: Renewal Highlights

On March 1, 2019, corporate recruitment activities for students graduating in 2020 officially kicked-off. As you may know, Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation) has decided to abolish guidelines relating to the timings of company briefing sessions and recruiting interviews for students entering the workforce from spring 2021. Students who plan to enter employment in 2020 are covered by current guidelines (however, the government is planning to maintain the current rules for graduates who'll join the workforce in spring 2021 and having discussions about implementing the new rules from 2022). As the number of students graduating in Japan is on a downward trend, it's become a major task for companies to secure those graduates as employees; so much so, that it can be easily foreseen that graduate recruitment activities will continue to accelerate.

Graduate Recruitment Site Renewal

Under such circumstances, it becomes important to create opportunities to encounter and share information with students early in the recruitment process. While we're commencing efforts to meet students at schools and colleges and are promoting internships to interact with potential employees, for now, in this Column, I'd like to introduce the renewal of our graduate recruitment website - the hub of information provision to students. I hope to pick-up on our work with colleges/internship themes at another time.

As we're a digital agency providing website design and development as a service, we have much experience in the production of recruitment websites for our clients. For this renewal, I liaised with our experienced Planners from the beginning and we created the renewal plan from scratch.

Renewal Highlights

As graduate recruitment manager, I'm aiming to create a "strong understanding of Mitsue-Links and recruit those who'll be active with us for a long time." Therefore, I proceeded with a plan to convey to potential graduate employees, through good design and informative content, the key merits and characteristics of our company.

I considered appropriate answers to "what are the appealing elements of our company that we seek to convey and what kind of content can be used to express those elements", a question that most organizations companies contemplate. For this renewal, advice and opinions from recent graduate entrants was incorporated during the planning stage. This was because they were very recently our target audience and are aware of current trends.

In the following paragraphs, I will introduce some new content highlights. Please note that the links are to our Japanese recruitment pages. For English language recruitment information please click "Careers" in the global navigation above.

Corporate Personality and Organizational Culture

Based on the key concepts that represent our company, we sought various instances where our culture is realized and shared them on our new webpages. This then formed new, hub-like content that provides key information to students.

ROUTE400

Our strength is providing a wide-range of high-quality web services. Therefore, we offer various occupations and many unique career paths. We highlighted this diversity in ROUTE400 through the inclusion of content indispensable to a recruitment site - interview transcripts with senior employees who entered our company as graduates and who have all followed diverse career paths. Through the real voices of experienced employees, we introduced model "career paths" - an important theme in company selection for graduates as this allows them to visualize their own development and career progression after joining the company.

TEAMS

In accordance with our "Mitsue-Links 2019" strategy, we're aiming to be an organization that allows employees to make decisions as teams. While of course teams exist as various divisions within the corporate hierarchy, there are also various other formal and informal teams. After joining us graduates may be assigned to one of the featured teams, or work, socialize with their members, therefore, our intention was to show the friendly faces of potential future colleagues in order to provide a sense of security and inspire those to want to join these teams.

In addition to the above, there's much additional content too. So, I'd be most grateful if you visit the site to sense our company's culture and ambience for yourselves.