It has been a month since my last post. During these 2 months I have been extremely busy with job hunting in USA as well as research and study. Applying for jobs in the states has been tougher since the recession. For this reason, I tried not being too selective and applied to as many companies that still fall within my field of interest. I am interested in applying for jobs in Japan as well, that is why I also attended Boston Career Forum 2009, which is the biggest job fair for English – Japanese bilinguals. Basically, I was looking for positions as Software Developers/Engineers. This post broadly explains the processes involved in job hunting in USA and Japan (through Boston Career Forum). I hope this post will be helpful for people interested in applying to either.
Job Hunting in USA
US companies are different from Japanese companies in that they expect fresh graduates to be immediately productive once they enter the company, whereas Japanese companies generally do not expect fresh grads to be work-ready and tend to train fresh graduates from zero. This is reflected heavily in the job screening process and interviews. Japanese companies emphasize more on the potential of the interviewee, hence, the interviews are mostly Behavioral. On the other hand, interviews for American companies consist of a series of Technical Interviews with one Behavioral Interview in the end. The questions asked in Technical Interviews range greatly from very basic questions to hardcore technical ones that sometimes you have never encountered in school. In most cases, you are required to explain your answer orally and convince your interviewer.
Throwing out quizzes in the interviews is probably a part of US companies culture. In many of my interviews, I was asked quizzes like: “Why manhole has round shape?”, “Given 10 jars filled with the same number of 1 kg balls, only 1 jar is filled with 0.9 kg balls. How do you find which jar is filled with 0.9 kg ones with only one measurement?”, etc. These are the examples of the most famous ones. I even had one interviewer asked me a question from Die Hard 2: “You have 2 empty cups. One can hold exactly 3 liter, the other one can hold exactly 5 liter. If you have infinite amount of water, how do you get exactly 4 liter of water?”. For financial companies, they mostly ask probability questions. Sometimes the companies want to see how you react in a specific situation. A friend of mine was asked: “In 5 seconds, what is 39×41?” just as he entered the interview room. Of course this problem would not even take more than a second to solve, but when you are in panic even the simplest problem can be very hard to solve.
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