Job Descriptions
Templates

Under the Employment Security Act, the conditions shown when you advertise have to be accurate and cover the core items: duties, workplace, working hours and overtime, wages, insurance, and contract type and term. Since 1 April 2024 the list also includes the scope of possible future changes to duties and workplace, both in the posting and in the labor conditions notice issued by the start date at the latest. The practical rule is that the posting and the eventual contract have to match.

The job posting is the advertisement a candidate reads, carrying the statutory disclosure items and written to attract applications. A job description in the Western sense is an internal document defining scope, level, and evaluation criteria, and it is far less common in Japan outside job-based employment systems. These templates serve both: the posting sections are written to be published, and the responsibilities and requirements are precise enough to interview against.

Write it in the language the job is performed in. English filters correctly for a genuinely English-speaking team. Japanese reaches a much larger pool, because most mid-career candidates in Japan search in Japanese. Bilingual teams do best with a Japanese posting plus a short English section, not a machine translation of one into the other. What matters more than the language is that the Japanese level you state is the level you actually enforce at interview.

There is no pay-transparency statute in Japan forcing a published band, but whatever wage information you show has to be accurate. Competitively it is close to mandatory for tech roles: candidates filter by salary, and a posting with no figure gets skipped. State the annual figure, say whether it assumes a fixed overtime allowance, and say how many months of bonus are included.

Three to five for most roles. Every additional must-have multiplies against the others, and the mid-career pool for a given stack in Japan is small before you start filtering. Write the list, then move anything the person could learn in their first quarter into nice-to-have. If a requirement is genuinely non-negotiable, be ready to say how you will test it at interview.

Ask what the job needs rather than which certificate sounds safe. N1 is a reading-heavy exam and a poor proxy for running a stand-up or handling a customer call, and plenty of engineers who work comfortably in Japanese have never sat it. Describe the situation instead: daily stand-up in Japanese, specifications in Japanese, customer-facing meetings in Japanese. Defaulting to N1 on a role that is genuinely English-capable is one of the most common ways companies shrink their own pool for no return.

Yes, explicitly. Silence is read as no by candidates who need sponsorship and as yes by candidates who hope for it, so an unstated position costs you applicants at the top of the funnel and wastes time further down. One line covers it: whether you sponsor, and whether you support a change of status for someone already in Japan. The Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services visa guide covers what Immigration looks for.

One page of substance. What moves response rate is concrete detail: what the person ships in the first six months, the real stack, team size and reporting line, working model, and the band. Cut every line that would be equally true at any other company hiring the same role, then look at what survives.

Indirectly, yes. For the Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services status, Immigration looks for a clear match between the duties, the candidate's degree or documented experience, and a salary at least equal to what a Japanese national would receive for the same work. Vague or general-labor duties make that match harder to demonstrate.

Review it every time you reopen the role, and rewrite the salary band at least once a year. Tech compensation in Japan has moved fast enough that a band carried over from a search two years ago now sits below market for most engineering roles, and an underpriced posting goes quiet rather than producing weak applicants. If a posting has been live six weeks with no qualified applicants, the problem is almost always the band, the must-have list, or the Japanese-language line.