Here at Hacarus, we place heavy emphasis on creating a global team and fostering an environment to be able to work with people all over the world through employing English.

Kyoto AI startup, Hacarus, located in the heart of Kyoto, engages in hiring in remote areas such as the Philippines and Sendai. Hacarus is headquartered in Kyoto with 5 full-time members, one of whom are not native Japanese speakers, Vice President of Product Marcel from Germany.

Perhaps, amongst Japan’s startups, there are only a few companies that make the conscious effort to globalize their staff. In the recruitment and management team, we make it a point that in expansion of our business and staff, to always ensure a means of internationalizing.

Regardless of the company’s working language, IT companies all over the world are increasingly growing their hiring activities. However, until now, majority of companies that have open job offerings are basing their conditions on how well a foreigner can speak Japanese, often the requirements stating:

• "Foreign nationals who speak native-level Japanese"
• "More than Japanese Language Proficiency Level ◯"

Striving to become more globalized, Hacarus is making conscious efforts to employ English in its working environment where the use of English during work will continue to grow and global talents do not have to communicate in Japanese or work in a Japanese-only environment.

The following includes the efforts Hacarus is bringing to the work setting:

In Hacarus, English is the standard working language

There is a total of 45 employees at Hacarus, including full-timers, interns, etc.
Within Hacarus’s employees, ¼ can speak English.
Hence, communication tools that we use (like Slack and Backlog) are written with English or with Japanese and English side-by-side.

We actively increase the opportunity of using English

From the outset, we did not focus on the hiring of bilinguals (proficient in both English and Japanese) at Hacarus, instead, we make it a point to actively use English at every opportunity. From every morning gathering to our traditional meditation and CHO’s exercise routine, we use English as the ideal opportunity to talk with fellow coworkers and develop friendships.

Even in company activities, there are also temples that have its entire course in English, where we all joined in the experiencing English-guided meditation classes.

Below is the meditation classes offered in English at Shunkoin:

If you try it out, you’ll also get to receive your blessings in English!

Here's one of many articles on our company activities, zazen (seated meditation):

Using English is all just fun

Pull request from abroad
We published the Python library that HACARUS-X uses for sparse modeling on PyPI and Github. From our first publication, we did our best to apply English and one day, we received pull requests from engineers abroad! Not using English would have diminished our chances of trying out the best OSS (Operational Support Systems).

The first pull request from engineers abroad to spm-image was released in March. The interesting thing about OSS is that you can receive feedback from around the world. It is fixed, but it is important to operate in English.

- Taken from Takashi Someda Twitter Profile

A New Experience for an Intern from America

From this summer, Harvey Cornell from the University of Texas at Austin, a renowned university in the United States, came to Japan as an internship student at Hacarus for about 2 months. Wanting to experience life in a different culture, he expanded his options for trying work in a different country and chose to work under an internship at a Japanese company.

Harvey’s impression as a Hacarus intern, being able to work in close distance to the CEO and CTO, trying out a wide range of tasks and challenging himself in a new environment, was the highlight of his experience.

For Hacarus members, Harvey’s internship brought a in new perspectives on work as well.

Our Hacarus Friends Also Participate in World Conferences

This summer, one of our members who engages in application development in the Philippines, made an appearance at PyCon Korea. We are proud to say that our members are not only using their platform to participate in domestic conferences, but also in conferences held overseas. Chances to understanding, gaining expertise and access to participate in conferences abroad within the company is gradually growing.

The other day, CTO Takashi Someda had also spoken at the PyCon event using the slide below:

The Difficult Task of Globalizing a Company

As a company grows, stabilizing the working environment especially one that is growing to be globalized is difficult. Employees from multicultural backgrounds and with different native languages can likely encounter difficulties- although this is not at all an unusual case. However, from the outset, Hacarus has been welcoming members from abroad into its management team as well.

The reason being is that the Japanese way of performing, communicating, and way of thinking has been molded to be corporate-like throughout time and therefore, makes it difficult to bring changes. Because of this, starting off the company to be globalized can make things much easier.

I personally felt that members of Hacarus, indeed have long-term experiences abroad and experienced venture company growth.

Of course, the culture of using English as a base would not be 100% reasonable. In an article by 500startup, both merits and demerits are listed. There is no universal approach. In fact, building a hybrid environment may be the best way to approach this.

See below ↓

"Born Global" A Movement Necesssary for Startups Aiming for the World

Should Startups Make the Official Language English?

Nevertheless, Hacarus is currently making efforts to overcome obstacles and look at the merits that are attainable to further become a internationalized company.

At Kyoto Startup Summer School, a program offered by Kyoto Institute of Technology, Hacarus also took charge of workshops for international students and engage in gradually making further connections to people abroad.

Internationalizing from here on out

Remote work, work reform, working in various contexts have become increasingly referenced in hiring. Within that context, phrases like “Fresh graduates job hunting in Japan/High employment of new graduates!” or “There is a shortage of domestic engineers!” have become common.

However, the question is, should that be the focus of recruitment in Japan? From here on, we can expect few companies will earnestly hire non-Japanese speakers and foreign talents. In my perspective, the situation calling for foreign talents is not out of reach and increasingly is becoming available. These foreign talents will grasp opportunities for work not only in Japan, but internationally.

That being said, wouldn’t you like to work at a global startup company like Hacarus?

Hacarus is looking for new pals for the following positions:

• Embedded senior engineer
• Data Scientist

Development

• Embedded senior engineer
• Data Scientist
• Machine learning engineer or intern
• Software Engineer

Business

• Finance Accounting Manager
• First AI x Tech Sales
• Business development/In-charge of Alliance

Apply below!

※日本語版