Information Releases

Survey of Corporate Attitudes Toward Hiring Trends for 2019

Companies planning to hire full-time employees continue to be high at 64.2%
— Among human resource developments that lead to productivity improvement, OJT is particularly high at 60.1% for the short-term —

Introduction

Amid a worsening labor shortage, the effective ratio of job openings to applicants for 2018 stands at 1.61, the highest level in 45 years, since 1973. The job offer tentative acceptance rate for new graduates also increased to 87.9% (university graduates) as of December 2018, marking the 8th consecutive annual increase and the highest rate recorded since the survey began in 1996. Furthermore, while the “work-style reforms” are advanced by government and companies, there has been increased attention to the relation between productivity and human resource development.

Therefore, Teikoku Databank has conducted a survey on corporate attitudes toward hiring trends for 2019. This survey was conducted in conjunction with the February 2019 TDB Trends Research.

*Survey period: February 15 – 28, 2019; Companies Surveyed: 23,031; Valid Responses: 9,701 (Response Rate: 42.1%) The survey on hiring has been conducted every year since February 2005, and this is the 15th survey.

*Details of this survey can be found on the dedicated Economic Trend Survey HP. (http://www.tdb-di.com/)

Primary points of survey results(summary)

  1. 1 64.2% of companies responded that they are planning to hire full-time employees in 2019, marking the 5th year in a row this percentage has exceeded 60%, but it declined for the first time in three years. Notably, “large companies” (84.8%) indicated a high motivation toward hiring, marking a new high since the start of the survey. However, the percentage of “SMEs” (59.1%) responding this way fell below that in the previous survey (conducted in February 2018). While large companies continue to be positive about hiring full-time employees, the SMEs’ stance for hiring full-time employees is at a high level but has paused.
  2. 2 50.3% of companies responded that they plan to hire non-fulltime employees, surpassing half for the 2nd year in a row, but declined 2.1 points from that in the previous survey, indicating that the motivation for hiring non-fulltime employees has paused for a while. 90% of companies in “food services,” and more than 80% of “food and beverage retail” and “drug and daily commodity retail,” which are suffering from a labor shortage of non-fulltime employees, plan to hire non-fulltime employees.
  3. 3 18.3% of the companies surveyed expect that the full-time employee ratio for 2019 will increase beyond that for 2018. The contributing factors for this were “to support business expansion” (45.8%) at the highest percentage, followed by “to fill vacancies left by retirees” and “to increase hiring of full-time employees for the purpose of technology succession, etc.,” both of which were in the 30% range.
  4. 4 With respect to the most effective human resource development method to improve productivity in their own company, “on-the-job training (OJT) in the workplace” was remarkably high at 60.1%, as an effective method for productivity improvement in the short term (within one year). On the other hand, in terms of effect in the long term (over one year), “on-the-job training (OJT) in the workplace” (26.8%),”off-the-job training (OFF-JT)” (22.7%) and “on-the-job development (OJD)” (22.4%) were all in the 20% range, and indicated a tendency for there to be diverse effective human resource development methods.
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