Promotion of employment of talent from overseas by taking advantage of fully remote work

Q.Why did your company decide to take on interns? What did you aim to achieve?

We decided to accept an internship after introduction from an acquaintance and because the acceptance itself was not as difficult as we had expected. Our company’s main businesses are tourism (Pokke tourism DX service) and information flow design for companies (Studio), and are conducted on a fully remote basis. We intend to employ workers who match our company regardless of places and forms of work, by taking advantage of fully remote work and, as part of such employment, we have been interested in hiring talent from overseas.
However, we were not recruiting workers from overseas, as it seemed difficult for us. Then, as an acquaintance introduced the Japan Internship Program to us and it did not seem so difficult, we decided to accept interns.

Research on tourism information of the interns’ and other countries to which we could not access before.

Q.What kind of internship did you run? What difficulties did you face and how did you resolve them?

The internship was conducted for the purpose of providing useful information with overseas perspectives to our company’s clients. Specifically, research was conducted on information outside Japan in the fields of tourism and sales marketing and reports were prepared based on the research results. We are planning to compile the research results into a whitepaper and distribute it to tourist spots and companies via e-mail or other means. As Assem-san is from Kazakhstan and Ikkubaru-san is from Indonesia, we asked them to conduct research and prepare reports on tourism information in their home countries, as well as in the United States, European and other countries. Although no aggregated information was available on the government websites or in languages other than English depending on the countries, they handled their tasks well and worked exactly as how we requested. We are also very grateful for their contribution to our company by sharing information on different cultures we did not know about and by giving us extra output.

We could identify weaknesses of our organization and gained tips to review our organizational management by working with interns.

Q.Comparing before and after the internship, what effects did it have on you, your employees, or your organization?

The first is that employment of overseas talent became a reality. We used to think it would be too difficult to even consider employment of workers from overseas for a small company like ours. However, the experience of the internship program wiped out this concern, and renewed our recognition to think that employment of overseas talent is actually possible. Assem-san and Ikkubaru-san, who came to our company as interns were both excellent workers, and made us think that a company like ours should consider employing overseas talent. Working with them also gave us many opportunities to notice cognitive bias and organizational weaknesses that we had not realized ourselves, as well as tips to review our organizational management. Although it will be difficult to improve everything all at once, we intend to make use of what we have learned from the internship and strive to create an organization in which diverse human resources can display their abilities.