Explains some things

(Entirely in Japanese)

1. As soon as the call was answered, they kept talking nonstop in a rapid-fire manner. The speaking speed was already fast enough, but they also liked to run their words together.

2. The questions were very strange and differed greatly from interview experiences shared online. I was asked things such as what I liked about the company and why I was interested in them. In short, the questions were about the company rather than what I could bring to it. It is not that being asked these kinds of questions is strange; what was strange was that the interview was like this from beginning to end. The job I applied for had nothing to do with game production, planning, or anything similar, and before the interview I was not given detailed information about the position—only a rough understanding of the job responsibilities (it felt like it mainly involved miscellaneous tasks). After I finished answering, the interviewer explained that the things I liked were unrelated to the type of job I had applied for. Of course they were—the position I applied for had nothing to do with games.

3. They did not explain the job responsibilities at all. From beginning to end, it felt like they were testing how much I knew about the company. Wasn't it only the information available online? They were probably testing whether I loved the company.

4. They asked for a very long time about what other companies I had applied to. Then they said, “That’s quite different from our game industry.” (Of course it is different—it’s a different company.)

5. They hung up the phone extremely forcefully. (Japanese companies usually teach proper telephone etiquette very early on, so encountering this was very bewildering.)

Advice: Personally, I think they wanted me to mention some of the company’s successes, and wanted applicants to be extremely ambitious and passionate about the game industry. The difficult part is that if the position is not in production, design, or planning, it is genuinely hard to know how to express that ambition. Keep this in mind before the interview. (If you are an applicant unrelated to the game industry—for an exaggerated example, an accounting position at a game company—you need to learn how to connect accounting with the game industry’s ambitions.)

Personal thoughts: It did not feel like what I had read in the available information. The website says that the atmosphere is wonderful, but perhaps you can only find out whether that is true after joining. You could tell that the interviewer was extremely proud of the company, and when answering my questions, they responded just like the website. Their attitude was extremely unfriendly. (Polite in form, but lacking genuine courtesy.) They seemed like the type who thinks, “Lots of people come to interview at our company, so don’t waste my time.” I also really want to say this: They had clearly reviewed my résumé and invited me to interview, and they knew I was a fresh graduate. If they did not need someone like that, could they please not waste other people’s time by interviewing them?