I experienced an interview with AEON Corporation in Tokyo, in 2012, and would just like to highlight a few details of my experience with the Corporate Division Recruiter, Mr. Colby. AEON may well be a good company to work for but if you are interested in working in the AEON Corporate Division (Tokyo) as an instructor then you have to get through the first interview with one particular recruiting staff member and that experience might change your opinion of the whole idea of working for AEON Corporate Division (Tokyo).

Enter - Mr. Colby. He is the Recruiter who is most likely to interview you and you may find his ways uncomfortable and high handed. Why? Well, I can share with you what happened to me. On my interview day Mr. Colby took me to the interview room - 4m x 3m - and gave me 10 minutes to prepare a mock lesson with a photocopy of a randomly selected activity page from an English language textbook. After 10 minutes he returned with two young Japanese female staff who clearly wanted to be somewhere else rather than at the mock lesson. They both seemed to enter the room quite begrudgingly at his side. God knows why, so I thought at that moment. I didn't know why at the time. Yet after participating in the interview I can now say that I thnk I learned why and perhaps the detail that follows goes some way to explaining why I felt that I sensed their discomfort with him.

The mock lesson itself was simple enough. I asked some questions, elicited some answers, asked some follow-up questions, wrote some language on the whiteboard, etc. The two ladies spoke English quite well and were pleasant to me. However, Mr Colby, was sitting the whole time at the classroom table and typing away on his PC (perhaps about the mock lesson) while I was teaching and at a distance of no more than 2 meters away and often staring at me from that short distance, a little distracting perhaps.

Ok, so the mock lesson was over and then I was left in the room for 15 minutes to write several paragraphs of self-refleciton on what I thought of my mock lesson teaching performance and how I could improve it. Mr. Colby returned after keeping me waiting for 35 MINUTES without any form of apology or consideration for making me wait and then the interview proceeded with some questions about my thoughts on my mock lesson performance.

One thing really stood out about this recruiter, he was aggressive in attitude. Maybe that makes him successful at his job but it may make you wish you didn't spend your time taking the interview there. A couple of interesting points here. Firstly, the young Japanese lady who sat by his side during the interview after the mock lesson (and who was one of the mock lesson students) indicated a noticeable degree of discomfort through her interactions with this recruiter, and that behavior was consistent with her discomfort when she had walked into the room prior to the mock lesson, too. That same feeling of discomfort was evident in the other Japanese lady who had posed as one of the two students in the mock interview. These two staff members were pleasant enough to me as mock lesson students but I don't think they liked this recruiter. I felt the same way with this recruiter after what happened next.

Finally, the most important detail. I remember being asked on different ways that the material could be taught. When I answered that I could think of two ideas and gave a brief description of them, Mr. Colby's reply was (clearly sarcastically and laughingly so), "Is that all? Only two ideas? I can think of a hundred different ways to teach this material!" There within lies the attitude that you may encounter if you choose to approach the Corporate Division of AEON (Tokyo) and if you have an interview with Mr. Colby. Suffice to say, I accepted the high-handed and aggressive manner that I experienced, politely left the interview, found a job elsewhere, and moved on. Yet, I think it might be beneficial to share this brief and true encounter of the interview experience that I had and that may await you if you are trying to find a job with this organization. Be careful!