How to Sequence Your First Hires for Japan Market Entry
Five seats, four searches, and one seat you buy rather than hire, with the four searched seats committing ¥116,781,000 of salary, agency fee and employer social insurance in the launch year.
Hiring Timeline Builder
Work backwards from each start date to the day the search has to open. Price the plan, export to PDF, save your work.
Search may open
Search
Offer window
Notice
Ramp
At work
Bought
5
4
3
￥116,781,000
Open the First Search
The plan says when each search has to open. Agencies that place first hires for foreign companies can start from the earliest one.
What You Can Do With It
Sequence a Market Entry
Set the date you need each person at work and read off the date each search has to open. Overlapping searches are visible from the first screen, which is where most entry plans discover they are already late.
Price a Hiring Plan Before Approval
Every seat carries salary, agency fee and employer social insurance, totalled across the plan. Take one number to the board rather than four spreadsheets that disagree.
Test Which Seats You Can Defer
Drop a seat or move a start date and watch the kickoff dates move with it. Shows what a headcount limit actually costs, which is usually a kickoff rather than a start date.
Separate What You Hire From What You Buy
Mark a function as bought rather than hired and it stops producing a kickoff date. The tool still prices what hiring it would have committed, so the comparison is on the page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the tool give a date range instead of one date?
Because both inputs are ranges. A search runs 90 to 120 days and a notice period runs 60 to 90, so the date a search has to open is a window, not a day. Narrow either range and the window narrows with it. A single date would be more comfortable to read and would not be true.
Where do the salary figures come from?
From a consensus across the published 2026 salary guides, reconciled per role and never lifted from a single guide. A seat with no published row is left blank for you to fill in rather than estimated, and each prefilled figure shows how many guides stand behind it.
What fee rate does it use?
You choose. Exclusive and contingency both load the market-standard rate for that model, and a custom option takes your own figure. The rate applies to every seat, because the model is normally settled once at the first search.
Is my plan saved anywhere I do not control?
No. Plans are saved in your browser's local storage and are never uploaded to AirTA or anywhere else. Export as JSON to back one up or move it to another device, and as PDF to share it.
Is the hiring timeline builder free?
Yes. The tool is free to use with no account required, and it opens on a worked five-seat example you can edit rather than an empty screen.
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