Brokers and the Organization of Recruitment of ‘Global Talent’ by Japanese Firms—A Migration Perspective

Japan’s major companies, aiming to diversify their human resources, have in recent years begun to systematically recruit non-Japanese graduates from universities in Japan, but increasingly also from overseas, for permanent positions in Japan. This article locates this development within the study of migration. Utilizing data from an interview study with brokers, HR departments and young foreign employees, it follows recent calls to look at the meso-level of migration. Looking at brokers in qualified labor migration and positioning them equally in a triangular relationship between employers and migrants, this article contributes to the growing discourse on brokers and migration that has so far focused on low-skilled, often temporary migration from a broker-migrant perspective. Based on the Japanese case, our research makes two contributions to the migration literature. Firstly, we show how following the call to investigate the changing roles of brokers along the stages of initiation, take-off, maturity and decline of a migration trend, does indeed contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of a migration system. Secondly, we demonstrate that brokers play a particularly important role in qualified labor migration and propose that the level of broker engagement depends on the degree of distinctiveness of employment systems.