In the years since the pandemic normalized remote work, companies everywhere have had to find new ways to spot outstanding talent and evaluate it fairly without the benefit of being in the same room. INA believes that "a company's growth comes from the growth of each individual employee," and treats staff not as replaceable labor but as the company's irreplaceable asset — a distinction we render in Japanese as "jinzai", a term closer to "human capital" than to "human resources." This article sets out, from that management philosophy — the conviction that people are a company's fundamental value — how to identify outstanding talent in the age of telework.
What challenges does evaluating people remotely create, and how can they be solved?
Because remote work makes non-verbal cues hard to read, the key is to increase two-way communication, and to introduce objective evaluation criteria and goal management.
Under telework, managers and colleagues have far fewer opportunities to directly observe how a subordinate is actually working, and that creates evaluation challenges of its own kind. The facial expressions and body language that would normally come through in person are difficult to pick up online, and the resulting shortfall in communication tends to breed misunderstanding. It also becomes harder to judge attitude and effort, since managers struggle to properly grasp the process and the emotional investment behind results that they cannot see directly. American and European companies that shifted to hybrid or remote-first arrangements around the same time report very similar frustrations, which suggests the problem is less a quirk of Japanese management culture than a structural feature of remote work itself.
The following measures are effective against these challenges:
- Increase the frequency of communication: Set up regular one-on-one meetings and team meetings online, creating a space to share work status and concerns.
- Clarify and share evaluation criteria: Make explicit, in advance, what will be evaluated and how, and communicate this thoroughly to everyone. Under telework in particular, evaluation based on objective indicators such as degree of goal achievement becomes essential.
- Introduce management by objectives (MBO): Adopt a goal-management system in which employees are evaluated on results measured against goals agreed upon with their manager, making it easier to evaluate people fairly regardless of location.
- "Visualize" work processes: Introduce daily and weekly reports so that the process and effort that are hard to see when someone works from home get written down, giving managers material with which to evaluate a subordinate's effort and growth.
What special considerations apply to interviews and selection processes conducted online?
In online hiring, structured interviews (the STAR method) that draw candidate assessments from verbal information, combined with sharing information in advance and having candidates meet multiple employees, are effective for building mutual understanding.
Identifying outstanding talent also requires adapting the hiring interview and selection process to the realities of working online. Unlike an in-person interview, a candidate cannot get a feel for a company's atmosphere simply by walking through the door, so it helps to send company profile materials and recruiting blog posts ahead of the interview so candidates can absorb the company's culture and vision beforehand.
As a selection method, using structured interviews (the STAR method) is effective. In a web interview, an interviewer cannot rely as heavily on visual cues such as expression and body language as they would in person, which makes it more important to judge a candidate from what they say. By walking systematically through a candidate's past concrete experiences — Situation, Task, Action, Result — an interviewer can objectively grasp a candidate's behavioral tendencies and values. This is essentially the same behavioral-interviewing technique widely taught in North American and European hiring programs, applied here specifically to compensate for the loss of in-person cues.
Arranging several rounds of online interviews with a variety of employees also allows a company to evaluate a candidate's personality and cultural fit from multiple angles. A growing number of companies are also adopting online aptitude tests, which makes it possible to select outstanding candidates from a much wider talent pool regardless of location — an advantage that mirrors the broader shift, seen across many international labor markets, toward hiring from anywhere rather than only from commuting distance of an office.
How should results be made visible and evaluated in a telework environment?
Using OKRs and KPI dashboards to achieve real-time "visualization," and shortening the evaluation cycle to give frequent feedback, are the keys to making results visible.
Under telework, how well a company can "visualize" results becomes the crux of evaluating its people. Adopting a framework such as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), which links team and individual goals and shares progress against them, makes it much easier to see how each person's contribution feeds into the overall goal. Sharing task completion status on KPI dashboards or project-management tools also enables real-time visualization.
INA has built a system in which it hires outstanding people based in regional areas of Japan and has them manage properties in central Tokyo remotely. Using technology to remove geographic barriers, and building an environment where people can succeed regardless of location as long as they deliver results, is, we believe, the real key to drawing out the true value of talented people. It is a Japan-specific twist on a pattern familiar from other markets — companies in the US and Europe have similarly used remote work to recruit talent outside major metro areas — but applied here to a domestic geography where, historically, working in Tokyo real estate meant living in or near Tokyo.
The feedback structure around evaluation also matters. Some companies shorten the evaluation cycle and build in frequent feedback, checking progress against goals monthly and offering advice as they go, speeding up the whole cycle. Maintaining employees' motivation and engagement at a distance depends on sharing evaluation results promptly.
How can autonomy, integrity, and alignment with company philosophy be identified?
Behavioral interviews that draw out past episodes to probe initiative and integrity, combined with checks on self-management ability and "mission interviews" that measure a candidate's resonance with company philosophy, are effective.
Under INA's management philosophy, people who combine autonomy (initiative), integrity, and resonance with company philosophy are considered the ones who truly create corporate value. Concretely, the following approaches are worth considering:
- Use behavioral interviews to probe initiative and integrity: Draw out a candidate's personality from past behavioral episodes, judging whether they are someone who acts on their own initiative and fulfils their responsibilities with integrity.
- Check self-management ability: In a fully remote environment, "freedom equals self-responsibility." Questions about time management and prioritization of work help gauge the strength of a candidate's self-management.
- Measure resonance with values and philosophy: Questions such as "what do you think of the vision our company sets out?" or "where do your own views on work overlap with our company's values?" let a candidate articulate their own values in their own words.
A growing number of companies hiring online are also incorporating reference checks — contacting a candidate's former colleagues or managers to hear about their integrity and how they actually worked, in much the same way reference checks have long been standard practice in hiring across the US and UK.
How can cultural fit and alignment with company values be measured online?
Communicating company culture in advance through owned media and social channels, and confirming cultural fit in both directions through virtual office tours and roundtable discussions with multiple employees, is important.
In remote hiring, it is said to be difficult to judge how well a candidate's fit with company culture and values will actually work out. In cases where an offer is made based on a web interview alone, there is a risk that a candidate joins without fully understanding the workplace atmosphere or culture, only to discover a mismatch after the fact.
One approach is to communicate company culture through owned media and social media in advance — blog posts introducing internal events and employee voices, videos discussing vision and ways of working, messages from leadership, and other multi-angle content delivered to candidates. Virtual office tours and online social gatherings are also effective. Roundtable conversations with multiple employees are another useful way of confirming cultural fit.
Where possible, running a remote trial period or internship lets a candidate briefly experience actual work and internal communication, which can substantially reduce the risk of mismatch after formal joining — a practical, lower-stakes echo of the trial periods and internship-to-hire pipelines already common in many Western graduate-hiring programs.
How can digital tools be used to judge aptitude and give feedback to talented employees?
AI-based aptitude tests and cloud-based HR evaluation systems can raise the precision of evaluation, but it is important to balance privacy and trust and to remember the principle that a human being makes the final judgment.
A wide range of digital tools and technologies are now available for evaluating talent in the age of telework. At the hiring stage, AI-driven aptitude tests and game-based assessments that measure cognitive ability and values have started to appear. At the performance-review stage too, cloud-based HR evaluation systems and analytics tools have become widespread, used to analyze what high performers have in common and to visualize motivation.
That said, using digital tools also requires attention to the balance between privacy and trust. Excessive monitoring can breed distrust among employees and undermine their motivation. It is essential to treat technology purely as a support for empowering and fairly evaluating people — a caution that applies just as much in markets with stricter statutory privacy protections around employee monitoring, such as the EU under the GDPR, as it does in Japan.
What is the outlook for securing talent in a hybrid-work environment?
In the age of hybrid work, companies that build an environment where people can thrive regardless of location, while balancing fair evaluation with flexibility in how people work, will be the ones talented people choose.
Hybrid work — a middle ground between fully remote and fully in-office — has become the dominant model. As geographic constraints fade, it becomes possible to secure outstanding talent across regions and even across national borders, but competition among companies to attract talent will only intensify as a result. Winning in that environment increasingly requires an approach that "puts people and trust at the center of management." The companies that thrive will be the ones that build an environment where people can succeed regardless of location, and that draw out the full potential of every individual employee even at a distance.
The conviction that people are the true source of corporate value does not waver, whatever the era. Companies need to keep evolving their systems for evaluation and development while making full use of technology, without ever losing a human-centered point of view.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How can a company run a fair personnel evaluation under telework?
Introducing management by objectives (MBO) or OKRs, and evaluating people based on objective performance indicators, is effective. In addition, shortening the evaluation cycle to give monthly feedback and holding regular one-on-one meetings makes it possible to run an evaluation process that feels fair and convincing even at a distance.
What is the key to seeing a candidate's true character in an online interview?
Using structured interviews (the STAR method) to systematically dig into a candidate's concrete past experiences is effective. It also helps to arrange casual conversations with multiple interviewers or future colleagues, evaluating a candidate's personality and cultural fit from several angles.
How can a company prevent a cultural mismatch in remote work?
Communicating an authentic picture of the company through owned media and social media, and letting candidates experience the company culture through virtual office tours and roundtables with employees, is important. Where possible, running a remote trial period can substantially reduce the risk of a mismatch after joining.
