My Job Search Experience in Japan

My name is Dmitry. I’m originally from Estonia, a small, beautiful country in Eastern Europe. I moved to Japan in 2011, studied at a language school, and worked in the restaurant industry.

At the time, I already had some web design skills. I could build a landing page or a simple business website. That helped me get my first projects and find my first clients in the restaurant industry. I made websites, landing pages, and marketing materials.

From My First Clients to My Own Company

I then opened my own company and started running a business. Working with clients involved much more than writing code. I took on projects, managed them, handled launches and monitoring, and stayed in regular contact with clients.

Over time, I developed my skills and started taking on more complex projects: blogs built on well-known content management systems, as well as online stores. The projects demanded more skills, so I kept learning. PHP was the first programming language I learned, and I worked with the popular Laravel framework. I was now building entire systems.

Through people I knew, I found projects involving car auction systems, systems for exporting Japanese goods abroad, and proxy shopping services for buying products from Japanese online marketplaces.

Why I Decided to Become an Employee

Eventually, I wanted to gain more substantial experience in larger companies. I decided to step away from my own company, take the weight of managing a business off my shoulders, and focus more directly on development. That was the part I enjoyed most. In the end, I found my place in startups.

Before working in GovTech, I helped build a large marketing application. I developed its backend and chatbots. This was before the pandemic, before AI became such a big trend. I was the tech lead from the beginning: the first person to start putting the project together and building it.

I then worked as a backend engineer at a GovTech startup — a company working on government technologies. It had a fairly good internal structure and a close-knit team of engineers who had been working together for a long time. I learned a lot of new and interesting things from them.

After several years there, I started looking for new challenges. Early in the current wave of interest in artificial intelligence, I found a job at an AI startup. Alongside development, I helped build the team and took on the roles of architect and team lead. Those were very dynamic, eventful times, and I gained many useful skills.

What Looking for Work Helped Me Understand

All of these moves involved looking for work in one way or another. When I stepped away from my own company and began looking for an employed role, I entered the Japanese job market for the first time. Until then, I had found work through people I knew. Now I was searching job boards, preparing my first résumés, and writing my first cover letters.

The deeper I got into that process, the more often I came back to one thought: to remain a competitive candidate in the job market, you first need to understand what you can offer. To understand that, you need to keep going through interviews, applying for jobs, and seeing how many responses you receive, where you get accepted, and where you don’t. You can then use that information to draw conclusions about yourself and what you’re doing.

Each of my job searches involved scattered files and emails. I would often grab the first offer that came along instead of taking a closer look at all the opportunities available to me.

Sometimes you do need to seize an opportunity. But you still need to do it consciously.

Why I Built Tenshoku Pad

I was missing a tool where I could keep all of this in one place: my career history, records of each interview, notes, and more. I wanted everything within reach, so I could go back to those records when I needed to and make sense of what was happening in my career.

I wanted preparation for the next interview to build on my past experience and the information I had gained from previous attempts, rather than starting from scratch.

The market has changed considerably since then. My impression is that finding a good job today can take dozens, or even a hundred applications to different companies, before you receive a suitable offer. Without a systematic approach, that process can easily become chaotic.

Tenshoku Pad grew out of that need. For me, it’s a way to bring my experience together, see how my search is progressing, and make more deliberate decisions. I want every interview to leave me with something useful: both the company’s response and experience I can draw on next time.