Run five Japan hires in series and the last one starts more than two years after the first search opens. Search takes 90 to 120 days and notice takes another 60 to 90, so five seats end to end is 750 days at the fast end. Nobody plans a market entry that way. A Japan hiring sequence is an order of kickoff dates rather than start dates, and the searches overlap: by the time your first hire starts work, your third search should already be open.
Four searches cover the five seats, because the fourth seat is bought rather than hired. The other four seats carry a consensus median across the published 2026 salary guides, with the agency fee and employer social insurance added.
Disclosure before going further: AirTA sells no employer-of-record or outsourced administration service and places no candidates itself.
Which seat opens the order is argued and priced in hiring your first employee in Japan, and everything here starts from that answer.
The Japan Hiring Sequence Opens Search Two Before Hire One
Search two opens in late December 2026, before hire one has even accepted an offer. The evidence for hire two's specification has to exist by then, and hire one has produced none of it. That is what ordering a Japan hiring sequence by kickoff date does to the gates you planned to set.
An agency quotes 90 to 120 days because kickoff is the part it influences, and how recruitment works in Japan sets out the agency structure behind that pace. An entry plan is written from the start date, because that is the date a board approves. Nobody on either side controls the notice period between them, which is fixed by a work rule at the candidate's current employer.
Across five seats that gap stops being a delay and becomes the reason the searches have to overlap.
A Japan hiring sequence written from start dates sets gates its own kickoff dates arrive too early to clear. "Wait until the commercial lead closes two deals" is a gate no five-seat plan can wait for. "Wait until the commercial lead's shortlist shows which companies your buyers come from" arrives four months earlier and answers the same question.
A shortlist names the employers of the people who sell what you sell, the titles they hold, and the compensation it takes to move them. All of that exists by week six of the first search, months before anyone starts work, and it is enough to write the second specification against.
Your first hire cannot brief searches two and three. Both open before their first working day, and the third closes before they finish a quarter.
One kind of gate still works. A first signed contract in Japan can legitimately hold the third search, because it is evidence no shortlist produces. Holding the second search for the same event costs the launch year, since that kickoff falls three months before the person who would sign that first contract has started work.
Four Seats in the Japan Hiring Sequence Carry a Median
Four seats come to ¥83,000,000 in salary. The fee adds ¥20,750,000 and employer social insurance adds ¥13,031,000, which commits ¥116,781,000 against the launch year before Japan has produced a day of revenue. Three of the four are on payroll inside it. The demand seat starts January 1, 2028, so its salary is mostly year-two payroll while its fee is payable on acceptance.
Every median in the table is a consensus figure across the published 2026 salary guides from Hays, Michael Page, Morgan McKinley, Robert Half and Robert Walters, reconciled per role and never lifted from a single guide's range. The fee is charged at 25% of salary, the exclusive point rate inside a 20% to 30% band, against 35% inside a 30% to 40% band on contingency. Employer social insurance is added at 15.70% on top of gross salary at the FY2026 rates, rising to 16.51% once an employee is 40 or over.
Read each row as the rough size of the seat rather than as your own offer. Seat totals here carry employer social insurance, which a salary-and-fee figure for the same seat does not.
Only 8 of the 181 rows in the 2026 consensus index carry an industry field, and two of them are in this table: Sales Director and Sales Manager are scoped to technology. Customer Success Manager is filed under the technology discipline rather than a technology industry scope, so that row, the marketing row and the administrative row read the same for a software entrant as for anyone else.
The explorer opens on Sales at the contingency rate of 35%, so set the model to Exclusive at 25% first, then move through the function picker to price the seats your own order needs. Its total column carries salary and fee alone, so add the 15.70% to read it against the seat totals above.
The rate is set once, at the first seat, and every seat after it is charged on the same terms.
Ten points separate the two models, so across ¥83,000,000 of salary that single choice moves the launch-year total by ¥8,300,000.
Where a seat in your Japan hiring sequence has no row in the index, the recruitment fee calculator takes your own salary figure and returns the agency fee at contingency and at exclusive. Its totals also carry internal time and vacancy cost, which the seat totals above do not.
Most Rows in the Index Rest on Only Two Guides
Two guides carry the Sales Director row. Of the 181 rows in the index, 126 rest on two.
Ten different combinations of the five publishers produce those 126, so a two-guide row means any two of them, and which two changes row by row. Sales Director rests on Morgan McKinley and Robert Walters, and Marketing Manager on Hays and Michael Page.
A two-guide median has a narrower base than a four-guide one, and the two behind it may not be measuring the same thing, because one publisher can report base salary where another reports total compensation. Sales Manager and Customer Success Manager rest on three guides each. Where the seat you are pricing rests on two guides, widen the range you take to finance.
The index has no row for some seats at all. The only operations manager row it holds is retail-scoped and there is no head of operations row at any scope, so the third seat can only be priced as a customer success or service delivery role. Country Manager carries a priced row in technology and life sciences alone, so an entrant in consumer goods, industrial or financial services will find nothing published for that seat. Where the salary guide holds no row, enter your own figure in the fee calculator rather than borrowing one from a nearby role.
Your Fourth Hire Should Not Be an Employee
Four of the five guides carry the administrative seat's median, better corroboration than 157 of the 181 rows in the index and better than every seat in the order you do fill. The seat carries no kickoff date above, because no search opens for it.
Hiring that seat commits ¥12,250,000 in salary, ¥3,062,500 in fee and ¥1,923,250 in employer social insurance, or ¥17,235,750 inside the launch year. The figure comes from the HR Manager row. Not opening that search leaves ¥17,235,750 uncommitted, before whatever the outsourced arrangement itself costs.
That ¥17,235,750 covers the demand seat at ¥15,828,750, with ¥1,407,000 left over.
Payroll, bookkeeping, benefits enrollment and contract administration are all sold in Japan as monthly services, and stopping any of them takes a notice letter. An employment contract does not end that way. The administrative function is the cheapest thing on the plan to buy and the cheapest to stop buying, which is a poor argument for making it the hardest commitment to reverse.
An employer of record employs a person you have already found, so it changes nothing in the fee line for any seat that requires a search. The EOR versus agency comparison sets out what each route leaves undone.
Who Can Hold a Japan Pharmaceutical Licence
What belongs on your payroll is what must legally or commercially be yours before revenue. Japanese pharmaceutical regulation supplies the hardest available test of that rule, and the rule holds.
Under the Act on Securing Quality, Efficacy and Safety of Products Including Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices, Article 12 permits no person without a licence from the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare to market pharmaceuticals in Japan. Article 17 requires a marketing licence holder to appoint a pharmacist as marketing director (総括製造販売責任者), a regulatory role under that licence rather than the marketing seat priced at position five above.
No seat in a Japan entry is more fixed: named in statute, filled by an individual professional licence, and required before a single unit is sold.
That seat is also routinely held by a third party, through the designated marketing authorization holder arrangement that regulatory consultancies in Japan sell as a service.
A seat Japanese law names and requires a pharmacist to fill can still be bought from a third party. An administrative seat with no statutory basis has a weaker claim on your payroll than that. Consult qualified legal counsel for your specific situation.
Five Start Dates Produce Four Kickoff Dates
The administrative seat needs no search, which is what removes the fifth kickoff. Working each of the four back through notice and then through the search puts the first kickoff in late September 2026, six months before anyone is at work.
The four kickoff dates behind an April 1, 2027 start are late September, late December, late February and late June. Two of those searches are still running on the day the first hire starts work.
The overlap runs in pairs rather than all at once. Search one is still open when search two opens, and search two is still open when search three opens, so each kickoff falls inside the previous search's window. The fourth and last search opens in late June, three weeks after seat three's offer was accepted, so the demand seat is the only kickoff that does not open inside another search's window.
Unemployment stood at 2.5% in the June 2026 Labour Force Survey, seasonally adjusted, and four searches for bilingual commercial staff reach the same shortlists through the same consultants. Run across the fifteen months from the first kickoff to the last start date, the four searches re-approach people who already declined. The pool behind all four is mapped in bilingual hiring in Japan.
Every date above derives from ranges, which is why they read as late September and never September 24. Recompute them against your own approved start dates and the ordering holds while the months move.
Three Hires Start Inside the First Year in Japan
Seats one, two and three start on April 1, July 1 and September 1 of 2027, all inside the launch year. The administrative function is bought rather than hired, and the demand seat starts January 1, 2028. A headcount limit of three costs no start date, only the late-June kickoff that would have filled the demand seat.
The builder opens on these five seats and the dates above, so the Japan hiring sequence becomes something you can test against your own approved dates. Change a target start and the kickoff moves with it, as a window rather than a single day, because search length and notice are both ranges.
Whatever start dates you entered, the notice period fell between the search and the first working day, and nobody at your company could shorten it. That is what pushes every kickoff earlier than most entry plans allow for.
Four Conditions Reorder the Seats Without Moving the Dates
None of the four conditions adds a fifth kickoff date. Each is checkable today, before a single search opens.
Each condition changes which seat carries which of the four kickoff dates, and the last two rows push a seat out of the launch year rather than moving a date inside it.
A Country Manager First Costs the Demand Seat
The order still works when it starts one seat higher, and the four kickoff dates do not move. Salary and fee both increase at position one, and the demand seat is what the launch year gives up to pay for it. The entries that genuinely need the leader before the revenue are set out in when the country manager really goes first.
Whichever seat opens the order, the first agency engagement is signed before it, which makes evaluate recruitment agencies in Japan a first-seat task rather than a later one.
The Five-Seat Chart Your Board Meeting Needs
The Japan hiring sequence becomes a plan once it carries your own titles and reporting lines. Name and Title are both required, so enter the seat itself in the name field where the person is still unknown, and use Key Interfaces & Dependencies to record which search has to close before the next one opens.
The chart exports as a PDF, with or without the annotations. It carries seats and reporting lines rather than yen, so keep the priced table alongside it and the two answer different questions in the same meeting.
Waiting for Approval Does Not Move the Kickoff Dates
The last of the first five hires in Japan starts in year two, and no amount of approved headcount compresses that. The Japan market entry hiring roadmap collects the benchmarks, planning tools and guides these four searches run on.
The first of the four kickoff dates is late September 2026.
A Japan hiring sequence approved in February 2027 has already missed it and the one that follows in late December 2026. The only variable left is how many months of the launch year are spent waiting for the first person to arrive.