How AI Trends Have Changed Hiring in Japan: Expert Insights
How important is candidate and employee trust in AI if businesses are to harness its full potential?
AI trends are delivering strong results across a wide range of business functions and employers that are not fully exploring where AI can add value may fall behind.
Our 2026 AI Report found that only 9% of employees in Japan distrust the use of AI in recruitment, compared with 22% globally. This openness may help explain why employers in Japan use AI more in recruitment, especially for CV parsing and screening (43% vs 31% globally) and video and transcript analysis (32% vs 20% globally).
To get more insights into how AI trends are reshaping hiring in Japan, we spoke with Steven Howden, Operations Director, Morgan McKinley Japan.
Here, Steven shares where AI is making the greatest difference, why human expertise still matters and how employers can introduce the technology responsibly.
What Are the AI Trends in High-Volume Hiring?
1. Graduate hiring
Steven shares that one of the most significant AI trends in Japan is its use in supporting high-volume graduate recruitment.
Japan operates quite a unique new graduate hiring process where everybody in their final year of university takes interviews and secures their job prior to leaving university.
“As a result, companies have these quite extensive recruiting processes for new graduate hiring which can be quite intensive and laborious”, Steven shares. He observes that a lot of companies are introducing AI to support screening applications and interviews for new graduate hiring.
2. Avatar interviews
“Some companies are conducting avatar interviews where instead of a candidate sending a full application, the first step will be an interview with an avatar where they'll be asked a few questions. Then, based on the performance in that avatar interview, they'll have a human interview”, Steven adds.
3. Screening CVs
For experienced hiring, AI is sometimes used for screening CVs. Steven shares that as Japan is a candidate-short market, companies keep their job descriptions open to try and attract as many applicants as possible:
“But that means they get quite a lot of applicants who are not suitable for the role. So they are using AI to screen out the unsuitable applications”, he shares.
Why Does Human Connection Still Matter in Recruitment?
Steven notes that not all AI trends affect every part of recruitment in the same way. For specialist, senior and leadership roles, human expertise remains central.
At this level, employers need to assess judgement, leadership style, relationship-building ability and cultural fit. These qualities are difficult to understand through automated screening alone.
“At the experience level and the specialist level, we're not seeing AI impact things as much. Here there is still a preference for using recruitment consultants to communicate, negotiate and manage the hiring process”, Steven adds.
Why is Responsible AI Adoption Important?
Japan’s relatively positive attitude towards AI creates an opportunity for employers to act with consideration on AI trends. But Steven cautions that trust should never be treated as a reason to introduce technology without the right safeguards in place.
Currently, more people are willing to use AI, and there's less suspicion of it. But as the adoption increases, there's going to be a safety risk, primarily with employees using their personal AI accounts for work.
In our 2026 AI Report, Japanese workers were found to be leading in the global data for using their personal AI accounts daily for work tasks (30% vs. 20% globally).
“Employers need to mitigate this risk by the use of transparent guidelines around approved tools, data protection and the types of work AI can support. Human oversight is equally important, particularly when reviewing outputs for inaccuracies, bias or AI hallucinations”, Steven says.
Employees in Japan will need to understand how to get the most from AI while using it safely, responsibly and in line with business expectations.
How Can Positioning AI as an Enabler Help?
Our 2026 AI report also shows that Japanese employees are the most optimistic that AI will create opportunities for them to take on higher value work and develop new skills over the next two years. On this, Steven shares an interesting insight:
He observes that Japan is a paradox when it comes to technology. Though globally it has a reputation for being technologically advanced because of the consumer electronics market, the adoption of new technologies to make processes more efficient is pretty low. For example, he shares how a lot of companies still use paper-based reporting and fax in Japan.
“I think that's why everybody is excited about AI in Japan because they see it as a real opportunity and they can see more benefit perhaps than other companies in other countries that use automation and other technologies”, he adds.
Another important aspect that Steven feels contributes to the optimism on AI is the positive communication by employers regarding AI:
“The communication is positive. Employers are transparent in sharing that usage of AI is to enable employees and to free up their time to focus on value additions and not to replace them”, Steven notes.
Also, with Japan’s ageing population, he feels that AI has to be seen as the solution to ensure long-term prosperity with fewer available workers in the industry: “It's a candidate-short market. There's less and less available talent in the industry. So AI is going to augment and support as opposed to replacing people”, he adds.
Which AI Skills Do Employers Value in Japan?
AI trends are also changing the skills employers value in Japan. Outside of technical roles, businesses are not necessarily looking for professionals who can code or build AI models. Instead, they need people who can work effectively alongside AI.
Steven identifies three core skills that employers are looking for in non-technical roles:
- Writing effective prompts
- Checking and verifying AI generated output
- Interpreting any data analysis that AI produces
“In prompting, they need people who can break down complex business problems and feed that into an AI engine to ensure that AI can work on those problems and come up with a solution.”
“Then they need to verify that solution, focusing on ensuring that there are no hallucinations or biases that AI is clearly vulnerable to”, Steven adds.
What Are the Advantages of Working With a Recruitment Agency?
As AI trends reshape high-volume recruitment, specialist recruiters can add even more value in complex hiring. This is particularly true for senior leadership, revenue-generating and client-facing roles, where technical capability alone does not determine the best fit:
“Recruiters can offer the human touch element, building relationships with those people in the industry and helping organisations to identify those people who are going to be the best fit culturally and technically for their organisation“, Steven shares.
He also notes that Japanese candidates like talking to recruiters. In a candidate-short market, this offers a unique advantage as recruiters can develop long-term relationships with candidates and help clients identify the right fit even if they are not open in the market.
For employees too, working with a recruitment agency offers a fair share of advantages. Candidates whose CVs might be getting rejected by ATS or AI screening can work with recruiters to circumvent that.
It is possible that a CV may not reflect the transferable skills, or a job description may not indicate the flexibility an employer has around certain requirements.
Recruiters can speak directly with hiring managers, clarify priorities and advocate for professionals whose experience may be a stronger fit than an initial AI assessment suggests.
Want to learn more about the AI trends in recruitment in Japan? Download our 2026 AI Report below – or speak to one of our consultants about your hiring.
