I have met with quite a few of the managers for executive recruitment firms here in Tokyo to explore if there’s room to improve on their current translation process and discuss other ways translation can bring business value. These firms work with a diverse set of clients and candidates whose level of fluency in both Japanese and English vary heavily. Therefore, most of them work hard to extend their web content and marketing material in at least these two languages. Besides localizing the website and keeping the foreign version current, this means managing the translation of the continuous stream of new job postings. Tokyo is obviously a very large market for executive recruitment, so this could involve posting more than ten jobs per day throughout the workweek.
Managing translation of these job postings poses a difficult challenge, since it's key to keep costs really low for this non-core activity, but still difficult to compromise on the two other performance parameters. First, fast turnaround times are critical in order to reach out to the right candidates ahead of the competition. Other industries might consider one week a decent response time, but this is a race where cutting an average of 15 minutes can make a very large difference. Second, credibility and brand are core assets for recruitment firms, and the quality of the translation needs to be consistent with a notion of “aiming for excellence”. We are seeing companies in many industries struggling with the inherent conflict between cost, quality and speed, and job postings make for an especially tricky and illustrative example.
So how do firms in Tokyo try to juggle these conflicting priorities today? Some are biting the bullet on cost and use traditional translation firms; some are using part-time personnel or interns and do their best to deal with the overhead and people turnover; some are using its regular, bilingual staff to also cover for translation when available. And more and more are using myGengo’s crowdsourced service.
