How I Finally Got My Job Offer in Japan — Through an Agent

Ten applications, ten rejections. In the previous article I wrote about that wall. This article is about how it finally broke — and it wasn’t a job fair, a portal, or a connection. It was an agent.

Enter the Agent

Among all the routes I was running in parallel, the one that delivered was ConnectJob, an agent service for international candidates. They introduced me to SOLIZE — the first company I worked at after graduation.

This is why I recommend foreign job hunters not to skip agents: an agent doesn’t just forward your resume. They match you with companies that have already decided they want candidates like you — foreign, technical, research-trained. You skip the silent filters that had been rejecting me for months.

And there’s a second benefit people underestimate: agents prepare you for the interview itself. Before the real interview, ConnectJob held a practice session with me — improving my 自己紹介 (self-introduction), walking through the questions the company was likely to ask, and polishing my answers. After months of facing interviews alone, walking in prepared like that was a completely different experience.

The Smoothest Process of the Whole Hunt

After months of rejection, this selection process felt almost suspiciously smooth:

First interview — including a simple test
Second interview
Done.

The interviews themselves were nothing like what I had braced for. They didn’t ask difficult questions — the opposite, in fact: the interviewers spent much of the time sharing information with me. What kind of company they were, what kind of work I might be doing there. It felt like the company I was applying to was, in a word, open — and that impression told me more than any condition written on paper.

No endless rounds, no case studies, no waiting in ambiguity. Sometimes the door that opens easily is simply the right door.

The Naitei — March 2024

The 内定 (job offer) came in March 2024 — literally one year to the month before my graduation in March 2025, and only about four months after I’d started hunting in November 2023.

On the day it arrived, I was at NIMS doing research, like any other day. And my honest reaction wasn’t fireworks. It was relief:

“Now I can just focus on graduating.”

Because here’s what every doctoral student knows but rarely says out loud: graduation is never 100% sure. And a job offer means nothing if you don’t graduate.

The Trade-Off I Took With Open Eyes

I’ll be honest about the offer itself: it was around the Japanese average for a fresh graduate. Not a special PhD salary.

I knew that if I kept hunting — harder, longer — I could plausibly have found something substantially higher, the kind of salary a PhD or even a postdoc position commands. I chose not to. My reasoning was cold and simple:

Every extra month spent chasing a better offer was a month stolen from the research my graduation depended on. And no graduation would make every hour of job hunting worthless.

So I said: it’s okay. Job security first, graduation above everything. Looking back, I still think it was the right call — and the next article explains one unexpected reward that decision unlocked anyway.

The Gap Year

With the offer secured a full year early, my final PhD year became less stressful — though still the hardest year of my life, because publishing papers remained the real boss battle.

SOLIZE held a 内定者 (offer-holder) event during that year — unfortunately online — and there were no pre-joining assignments. Just research, writing, and the countdown to two defenses.

Coming Next

There was one more privilege the PhD delivered before graduation — and this one, the degree earned fair and square. In the next article: changing my visa directly from 留学 to 高度専門職1号ロ, the Highly Skilled Professional status.