Consultant/Hiring eikaiwa

6 comments

1. I’ve always thought that that is one of the few ways you can progress in your eikaiwa career. Go from working as a teacher to recruiting. But that is only a wild guess. I have no way of confirming this.

2. My guesses would be that

   * it’s a low-margin business, so the salaries even of higher ups will be low.
   * most hiring and other decisions would be done in Japanese: the job would not simply be finding acceptable people to work teaching jobs.

3. Recruiters are scum of the earth. They are required to lie to applicants about, well, everything, and pretend they know something about teaching when they actually do not.

   Also, the only way to be hired to do this work is to be a good little eikaiwa worker bee and service the Queen for many, many years, while ass-kissing your way up the totem pole.

   They very very rarely hire from outside the company. Probably because their business practices are so shady, and someone would have to already be completely loyal and ready to toe the company line to stay in such a job.

   It also pays about as much as full-time teachers get, with perhaps a bonus twice a year. Maybe.

4. This is only a full time job for the biggest and shittiest companies. There are only a couple companies big enough to warrant that. It won’t be a good job because the companies are shit. Even the managers get shit pay and are overworked. Most eikaiwa, even regional chains, will not have a full time hiring person. They’ll be a teacher in a supervisory position or other member of management who has to do extra work whenever they have turnover.

5. If you want to be a recruiter go work in real recruiting. You can make upwards of 8 mil after a few years

6. I used to do that, albeit in the 1990s, so much of my experience is out-of-date.

   I worked at the mid-sized regional eikaiwa chain with about 30 teachers, so we had fairly regular turn over, but it was never enough to make it my full-time job. Hiring was really only about 1/3 of my responsibilities. I still had to teach–mostly as a substitute when someone called out. It was pretty common for me to go it the office in the morning and then find out in the afternoon that I would be teaching somewhere. It was a 12+ hour day and it wasn’t uncommon to find myself at 9pm more than two hours away from my home. I got paid overtime, but it was still lousy.

   In terms of Japanese, I had pretty rudimentary Japanese at the time, but my Japanese co-worker had good English. Our boss, was okay in English, but not great. His boss and above was zero. We regularly had to deal with the higher-ups, especially about hiring, which was always in Japanese, so I was often out-of-my depth. It really was a bilingual job and I wasn’t bilingual. In the 90s bilingual NESTs were rare, but these days not so much. I would be pretty surprised if a company would hire someone who had zero Japanese to do that job today.

   I did that job for about two years and left because the job was awful. I regularly had overtime, often working six days a week. I got paid ¥320,000 per month plus overtime (no bonuses), so the money was decent compared to what a regular teacher made at the time (¥250,000 per month), but the stress was terrible.

   What I hated the most was that a significant part of my time was spent mitigating interpersonal conflicts between branch managers and foreign teachers. Which sucked because most of the time it was people being petty and unprofessional.