Rakuten reviews

There are so many things to put here, I'm not sure where to start. ( 1 ) They started playing loud classical music in all of the hallways (24/7) and the bathrooms. If your desk happens to be anywhere near a hallway door, you will hear it ALL DAY LONG. ( 2 ) Every Monday morning you will come into work an hour early (the entire company) for the most boring meeting of your life, called "Asakai". You will need to come to the office and scan your badge on a special tracking machine, because if you don't attend this meeting every week it can be used to prevent your salary-grade promotions. ( 3 ) Speaking of tracking machines, every day your badge scans when you enter and exit the building and inputs that information into the attendance system. If you work less than the required hours in a day, your salary will be deducted. Polar opposite of flexible working hours. ( 4 ) Everything is based on how something appears. Management cares more that something appears good, than if it is actually good. Hard to give an exact example, but it's something you will quickly pick up on if you work here. ( 5 ) The evaluations systems here are very poor. They are set up in a way that your manager will essentially be looking at "why you shouldn't get a salary increase" as opposed to "why you should". Evaluation criteria works against you. ( 6 ) Speaking of salary increases, they will be slow. Don't expect a good salary at this company. That's why all of our great engineers leave the company for others. ( 7 ) You will need to take dozens of these tests called "E-Learnings" in order to get a salary-grade promotion. They are essentially a test which consists of between 40-100 powerpoint slides with a test at the end. They will often have nothing to do with your job. ( 8 ) When you have a job title promotion, it does not come with a salary increase. More work, no extra money. ( 9 ) There is a greater emphasis on hiring people without skills and training them rather than hiring employees who are experts in the field. This probably has a lot to do with how much employees cost.

Lack of Englishnization/ globalization, mediocre senior management, egotistical upper management/CEO, lack of technological advancement, dependence on M&A to expand company while touting messages to cut cost in the forms of employee benefits, there were countless cons that I've witnessed in my 2 years there. However, I want to emphasize 2 major alerting signs that should caution prospective employees, especially professionals who take their careers very seriously and realizes that working is not a joke and should not be subjected to the whims of HR. 1) Horrendous placement of people that do not align with their interests and/or skills: It seemed as though HR does not give a hoot about your background prior to coming to this company, particularly true if you're a New Grad. Let's just say that if you're bilingual in English and Japanese, welcome to domestic sales where there are 0 chances to use English. If you have a master's degree in finance and looking to get into the financial sectors within Rakuten, hope you'll have fun sending out newsletters because you'll be on the marketing campaign team. If you studied marketing, I hope you also like public policy because that is what you'll be doing. Oh, I see you have an MBA from a top-tier school, how about I pair you off with a mentor who don't have a fraction of your professional background and invite you to meetings that are completely in Japanese even though you cannot speak Japanese and thought the company was "Englishnized". And isn't it a good idea to place a foreigner who has never lived in Japan before to be in charge of creating domestic marketing campaigns for Japanese people. I'm sure that doesn't hurt productivity and efficiency at all. (These are all true stories by the way.) 2) The company fails to get to the root of the high attrition problem and resolve their employee's dissatisfaction. Instead, the company aims to cover up their shortcomings all the while shoving it in our faces of how lucky we are to be there. Rakuten is looking to become a global company, but a global company is not a company where you're forcing your Japanese staff to get a certain score on an English Standardized Test and threatening them with demotion and pay deduction. A global company is not one where you recruit students from top schools throughout the world to prove that x% of your workforce is non-Japanese while failing to assist them to assimilate into a completely different work culture and country. A global company should offer training for not only managers but all employees on how to work with somebody from a different background than you. It should be open and accepting and not delegate the tasks of "English teachers" and "company mascot" to these foreigners.