July 2004, Tuesday - Daily Yomiuri (English Only)

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2. July 2004, Tuesday - Daily Yomiuri (English Only)

Web "Perfect medium" for recruiter

By Tokiko Oba - Daily Yomiuri Staff Writter

Richard Bysouth remembers how he was frustrated four years ago for being unable to find any useful personnel recruitment Web-sites despite the wealth of information available in cyberspace.

At that time, Bysouth worked as a recruiter for the Japanese branch of a British head hunting firm. His task was to find the right people - in most cases candidates bilingual in Japanese and English - for his client companies by posting advertisements on job sites as well as in newspapers, in addition to screening candidates.

"I used foreign job boards. I used some Japanese companies. But I couldn’t find what I wanted" he recalled. To Bysouth , Japanese recruitment Websites were too expensive and time-consuming, and foreign services did not list enough Japanese-English bilingual job seekers.

So he thought, if he could not find any Web sites that suited his needs, he might as well create his own. This is exactly what Bysouth did in September 2000, when he launched CareerCross (www.careercross.com), an online recruitment service that targets people in Japan who speak both English and Japanese.

Currently, he serves as president and chief executive officer of Web site firm C.C. Consulting Co., Ltd. The Web site posts 1,500 to 2,000 jobs from at least 80 companies regularly, drawing about 100,000 visitors a month.

This is the latest turn in the long and winding career of the 38 year old Briton. After he quit high school, he undertook a wide variety of jobs while traveling around Europe, working as a farmer, nurse, sales-man, actor and so on, he said.

Bysouth flew to Japan in 1990, holding a one-way plane ticket in one hand and his total assets of 100,000Yen in the other hand. He opened an English-language school on his own, studied Japanese, married a Japanese woman and returned to London. He then joined a travel agency that transferred him to its Japan office in 1996.

While Bysouth’s background may sound unsettled to some, his rich job experiences in a bilingual environment helped him land the right vocation in the bilingual recruitment business.

Then he discovered the perfect match-linking recruiting with the Internet.

Bysouth believes advertising jobs online has an advantage over doing so in the print media as information can be quickly changed on the Internet. For example, he said, if a company posted a job advertisement on CareerCross, it may receive a response from good candidates on the same day. It also may cancel the posting as soon as it selects a candidate. But if it finds its advertisement is not attracting the right candidates, it can revise the ad to focus on a different group of job seekers.

"All things considered, one of the most successful e-business definitely is the recruitment business" he said. "the Internet is a perfect medium for jobs".