A 2025 review of Japan’s investment hiring market

2025 personally went by extremely fast. With 12+ years in Japan the last few years have felt like the most active hiring markets I have seen.

Markets we have been covering: Real Estate, Private Equity, Private Credit, Infrastructure and Asset Management (Alternative products).

Overall the market feels much larger in comparison to 3-5 years ago, with so many new entrants and strategies coming to Japan this has really widened the amount of career opportunities.

With this widening of the market, it does feel like the Senior Associate to Director talent pool is being stretched quite thin, due to new entrants wanting to start with a Head of Japan and a key junior-mid level execution person.

I think a good example of this is Real Estate Investment market. We have over 200 Real Estate Acquisition professionals (90% foreign real estate platforms) on our radar, we were looking back at job movements:

The table below shows observed job movements among real estate acquisition professionals tracked on our radar. This is not all 100% of market (as only using public information and not undisclosed job moves) , but I think a fairly good snap shot.

Talent Pool	2023	2024	2025	Total
Analyst/ Junior Associate	10	15	11	36
Senior Associate	9	10	7	26
Total Junior-Level	19	25	18	62
VP	5	6	6	17
Director	7	10	10	27
Total Mid-Level	12	16	16	44
MD/CEO	14	11	3	28
Total	24	37	29

With 2023 being an active year for new entrants and leadership hires, we have seen the ripple effect of hiring across the levels as teams starts to build out. I think the flow of new companies entering might be slower than previous years, the hiring focus will be on strengthening teams’ capability to deploy capital and succession planning, so this is where we expect (and are seeing) the Senior Associate to Director level Acquisition professional being in high demand.

Real Estate Asset Management as also had strong hiring demand in these past few years, for what we have been seeing it has been mainly for either 1) Operational asset experience or 2) Associate-VP level bilingual asset manager.

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Private Equity

The private equity market in Japan has grown meaningfully over the last few years, with several new platforms entering or re-starting in 2024 and 2025. As these teams begin to build traction with deals, we expect junior-to-mid-level hiring to remain a key area of focus.

However, unlike real estate, private equity has a more challenging talent pool. While activity has picked up in recent years, the market itself was relatively quiet for a long period prior to that. As a result, fewer professionals entered the private equity space in Japan 5–15 years ago, which has created a much smaller pool of bilingual experienced mid-career PE talent today.

The private equity market in Japan is also relatively small and well connected. This can work positively for firms that take a long-term, relationship-driven approach to team building, as strong hires often come through trusted networks.

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Entrepreneurs

It has been exciting to see across both Real Estate and Private Equity these last few years to see several professionals starting their own investment or asset management companies in Japan. It has been another contributing factor to the thinning of the talent pool, however exciting to see these businesses grow and capitalise on a very active market.

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Junior Talent competition

With more global investment funds targeting Japan the demand for junior bilingual staff is really high, not only for the buyside funds but equally for all the advisory firms that support these transactions in the market.

For juniors entering the market it is great, they have so many different paths they can consider for their careers. The common challenge we see is they are not aware of many companies so have low visibility on what is out there.

For clients that can see growth ahead, engaging and building up a talent pipeline at the junior level can be an easy and valuable task to build access for future hiring.

We launched a platform called Career Radar to help support aspiring investment professionals (students & 0-3 year experience) get more visibility to the market and career paths.

We want to work with clients to help build their visibility to these professionals and help develop an engaged talent pipeline to support future hiring plans. Some ways we could help:

• If you want to post a job for an intern or 0-3 year professionals please post the job for free.

• Build brand awareness - if you are (or would like to) hosting a career day or get to know our company type event, let us know as it would be great to share it with our audience.

We get many students and new grads reaching out to us, so hopefully this platform can become a place to help support them and get them into the industry.

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Atlas Recruitment is a Tokyo based recruitment firm focused on the Alternative Investment Markets. Our goal is to provide the best career support for professionals at all levels by providing industry knowledge and honest advice. For Job Openings, please Click Here