The Lady Gaga moment for corporate Japan

THE new staff recruitment campaign by major Japanese convenience store chain FamilyMart is striking. It is fronted by Lady Gaga – who apparently worships the chain’s fried chicken tenders – dancing for 30 seconds and asking “Why not work for FamilyMart?”

No matter how sincerely the global megastar enjoys the chicken, she does not come cheap, making the campaign the start of a distinct new episode for corporate Japan.

Superficially, the company’s need to spend big and raise its game on recruitment is clear enough. But the timing is especially revealing.

Japan, out of deflation and in labour deficit, now offers fewer cushions between companies and reality. The country’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has an investment-driven growth agenda that threatens to narrow the padding even further. 

The pressures of monetary normalisation, after years of ultra-loose central bank policy, demand increasingly out-of-the-box thinking from corporate leaders.

The labour-shortage implications of Japan’s shrinking, ageing demographics are not new, but have thoroughly caught up with it.

In July, the ratio of jobs to applicants across all industries was almost 1.2 times; in parts of construction, it was as high as 7.9.

Even with a sustained availability of immigrant workers, businesses like FamilyMart have few places to hide: self-checkouts, robot shelf-stackers and AI-powered tech will go a long way, but keeping such full-spec, high-quality retail running 24/7 still requires people – lots of them.

FamilyMart is now advertising for about 10,000 part-time staff for its domestic network; its larger rival 7-Eleven is looking for around twice that number, and is doing so without the star power of Lady Gaga.

More and more companies, say advertising agencies and consultancies, are diverting larger slabs of budget into recruitment campaigns.

And they are doing so with a sense of urgency – not in a mere hunt for raw staffing numbers, but for a suite of skills and a likelihood of loyalty that are in even more acute scarcity.

Japan has a crisis of misallocation, say company departments for human resources.

Corporate reform and higher rates

As Japan entered the millennium, a series of unspoken pacts were in place.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) had begun what would become a quarter-century experiment with ultra-low interest rates; companies, on their part, would spare the country mass unemployment by avoiding the most brutalising version of creative destruction; investors, by and large, would not make too great a fuss.

Companies that might not have survived in another environment muddled through, delaying consolidation and favouring sprawl.

The labour market, in industries that thrived in other countries on liquidity, became viscous.

People who might otherwise have retrained and moved elsewhere stayed put, bloating the workforce in non-useful places. Equity was not called upon to work its socks off for returns.

All this was a recipe for a protracted, double misallocation of financial and human capital that has been exposed by two changes.

The first has been the push for greater governance reform – a process that started with Japan’s first corporate governance code in 2015.

Early iterations of the code provided the basis on which investors could more effectively push Japanese companies to change their behaviour – primarily by focusing more sincerely on shareholders, thinning their flocks of non-core businesses and improving the independence of boards.

But the most recent revision, in July this year, required companies to continuously review and account for their allocation of resources, including human capital.

The second major change has been the normalisation of monetary policy by the BOJ, which has raised its target interest rate to 1.25 per cent.

That level is still low enough to be entirely manageable. But the psychological nudge, say executives, is starting to have an impact: Even if it is not doing so yet, the prospect of a higher cost of money is creating an expectation that capital allocation will, eventually, become a more existential activity than it has been in Japan for more than two decades. 

That should drive companies to become more active participants in job markets, in turn providing far greater social licence for people to change jobs and reskill for deployment where the economy most needs them.

FamilyMart has recruited Lady Gaga to its recruitment drive because it needs younger people who can be rapidly trained to work with whatever new technology the company employs to keep itself in business.

But her appearance signals the start of a much broader recruitment arms race in a Japan where corporate survival is no longer guaranteed. FINANCIAL TIMES