In addition to web production, our company runs an education business offering courses in Excel, Word, Illustrator and more, as well as on-site instruction for accounting and payroll software.

Thankfully, that education business is going reasonably well, but there is one thing that troubles us. And that is…

How hard it is to hire new staff…

In fact, we post job openings for web designers, instructors and so on as needed, but while we can secure web designers in a relatively short time, instructors are very hard to find. We don't even get a single inquiry about the position…

Why is it so hard to find instructors? After asking a number of people, I've come to suspect that the biggest reason is
that "people don't know what the job of an instructor actually involves."

The word "instructor" probably gives the impression of "someone with high-level PC skills," and the job description of "teaching things to other people" is more than enough to raise the bar even higher.
I was told that unless you have a great deal of confidence or experience, it's hard to apply.
Indeed—why had I never realized this before (laughs)?

So recently I decided to change our recruiting strategy.
Rather than targeting only job seekers who want to be full-time employees from the start, I decided to actively reach out to people who can only work part-time or short hours at first due to child-rearing and the like, but who want to work as full-time employees in the future.
Come to think of it, everyone at our company except me is a woman, and half of them are homemakers with small children. Another big reason is that I remembered how some of the employees who now work full time originally joined us as part-timers!

What's more, government programs such as the Career Up Subsidy, which provide funding when you convert non-regular employees into full-time employees, have become quite comprehensive in recent years.
By making use of these, we can take our time nurturing motivated people with the right aptitude, even if they can't hit the ground running right away. And for job seekers, some may find it appealing to work up to higher-level tasks over time rather than being thrown into demanding work from day one.
So I decided to strongly emphasize that current skills are not important.

I promptly went to Hello Work and asked to revise the content of our previous job listing.
But—this didn't go smoothly at all.
Why? The main reasons I wanted to change the job listing this time were:

1. That working hours can be set to match the job seeker's preferences.
2. That we are willing to hire someone as a full-time employee even if they don't work full time (40 hours a week)—for example, around 30 hours a week.
3. That while permanent employment is the premise, the first six months are a fixed-term contract (with the subsidy in mind…)

Those were the points.
Apparently this was an irregular case for our local Hello Work office—the reaction wasn't very positive.
No matter what I asked, the only answer was, "Is that written in your company's work rules?"

When I said, "Yes, it is!"
the reply was a thoroughly unenthusiastic, "Well then, I suppose it's fine…"

As any small-business owner knows, Hello Work job listings come with quite a lot of restrictions on what conditions you can state.
But this time the change was made with the intention of accepting a diverse range of people—so even that isn't allowed?
While the national government actively promotes the use of diverse human resources, I really felt that awareness at the local level is still low.
Diverse human resources means you have to anticipate many irregular cases, yet I couldn't help feeling that, at Hello Work at least, uniformity is considered the ideal.

Still, complaining gets us nowhere.
On the contrary, I came to think that it is extremely important to build systems that can accommodate diverse people and to write them into the work rules.
After all, having proper work rules in place is also essential when applying for human-resources subsidies.

Reviewing my own company's work rules again, I noticed there are still points that don't match reality. I plan to revise them right away, including consulting with a specialist.

Securing talent will only become more important from now on, but as a small business we can't compete with large corporations on compensation or benefits.
That means we have to build strengths in other areas. And what's indispensable there are the "work rules." If things aren't properly written down here, there's nothing to talk about.

We normally spend all our time thinking about marketing strategy, but the same applies to securing talent—and perhaps the work rules are what give that strategy concrete form. This experience made me realize that all over again.