After clarifying "what kind of work you desire in what position," you have two things to examine when selecting the company you move to. One is the company size based on the number of employees. For example, if the employee numbers are less than 150, even though a foreign capital company, it has similar benefit systems to Japanese small and medium-sized enterprises. At the same time, you can look forward to bigger cash compensation and best of all more challenges and opportunities at work. You will have many chances to get involved in management, making new proposals and decisions.
 The other thing to look at when narrowing down the industry for someone to change careers within non-sales divisions such as HR and accounting, is the composition of the company personnel. For instance, IT business is mainly made up with engineers and in the chemical business, core members have chemistry backgrounds. Usually the former values quick decisions and the latter accuracy. They have different work ethics and values in decision-making. You will need to carefully select in what kind of group of people you can work most effectively. "The fit to the company" is essential in being successful.
Prep for the job interview starts from creating your resume. Make it less than two pages and attach a manuscript of your professional activities if necessary. You need to specify not only the year, but the month to make sure there is no blank period in your career. In addition, you will win the readers’ confidence by putting exact figures for your performances in the resume. During the interview, the level of your future contribution to the company will be judged. It is crucial how well you can present the "variety of your skill sets" showing your character and qualifications in a concise manner. The "amount of data offered ahead of time" is important. You also need to be able to respond to sharp questions by preparing specific examples backing up what you wrote in the resume.
The interviewers are watching your integrity and communication skills through your responses and body movements. For example, telling a story about where you or your team failed in its objectives does not necessarily work against you, if you can properly and briefly explain how you took action to correct this for the future, since this will demonstrate your personality, strength and crisis response ability. Everything is not always predictable in actual business, so you should look on failures as an opportunity to improve next time around.
Normally this is of course confidential, but as a hint, there are questions I frequently ask at second interviews. First I would have the applicant describe the job content of the desired position with his/her own words. Then, I would ask how his/her experience and objectives meet or do not meet what we are seeking. From the responses, we can see the person’s level of understanding of the position, how much he/she studied our business; we can measure the applicant’s passion. We obviously prefer to find someone showing adequate understanding, and the answer will serve as a useful reference in judging the applicant’s mentality and ability to respond in a flexible and impromptu manner.
Profile
HR Director, Dassault Systemes K.K.
Ms. Noriko Takeuchi
Takeuchi san worked for a US based non-profit organization, educational exchange group, for 8 years, after graduating from university (where she majored in English Literature). She spent the next 2 years at their headquarters in New York and then moved to CitiBank Tokyo branch in 1984. At Citibank, she created personnel data for management, trained new recruits, handled work visa/ benefits for foreign staff, and was engaged in a wide variety of HR management process, i.e. organizational integration/ restructuring. Takeuchi san then moved to the HR department of International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington D.C., and worked as a professional staff in the career development division. While in the US obtained a Master's degree in HR at George Washington University. Takeuchi san returned to Japan in 2000 and joined the Japanese arm of a foreign capital finance company. She has been HR Director at Dassault Systemes since 2003.
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