Photo/Illutration An employee at this Hello Work Sumida office in Tokyo was found to have impersonated a job seeker. (Yuki Hanano)

A staff member of a Hello Work labor services office in Tokyo impersonated a job seeker and won several employment offers in an apparent attempt to reach a performance target, the labor ministry said.

The ministry views the falsification of employment figures as undermining trust in public job placement services and is considering disciplinary action against the individual, sources told The Asahi Shimbun.

The ministry will also investigate whether other staff members were involved and if published labor statistics were affected by the deception.

Each Hello Work office nationwide has targets for successful employment cases, and their employees, who are national civil servants, may receive quotas.

According to the ministry and other sources, the employee in question was responsible for career counseling at Hello Work Sumida in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward.

A ministry investigation found that the staff member registered two fake names as job seekers and then introduced the fictitious applicants to businesses with job postings.

At least nine companies showed an interest in the nonexistent job hunters.

The employee even personally attended job interviews under the fake names and was hired by four companies. These job offers were then falsely recorded as employment cases, the sources said.

The worker is believed to have later declined the offers.

Normally, if a job seeker declines a job offer, the case is excluded from employment counts.

However, if Hello Work does not learn that an offer was declined, the case remains counted.

As of October, four fake employment cases had been recorded by the staff worker.

The impersonation came to light in autumn after the deceptive employee’s real name was written in job application documents, and a would-be employer noticed the discrepancy.

The ministry has apologized to the nine companies.

“The investigation is ongoing, and the full picture is not yet clear,” an official at the ministry’s Tokyo Labor Bureau told The Asahi Shimbun. “We are considering disciplinary action against the individual.”

The ministry sets employment targets for each Hello Work office nationwide and publishes monthly performance figures on its website.

Offices under the Tokyo Labor Bureau’s jurisdiction receive guidance if their monthly results fall below 95 percent of the target.

Many Hello Work offices reportedly allocate targets to individual employees, leading to criticism that the system has become quota-driven.

Hello Work Sumida’s employment target for this fiscal year is 5,250 cases. As of October, it had recorded 3,514 cases, about 67 percent of the goal.

The office is one of 18 nationwide designated as “a problem-solving support model office,” with reinforced staffing.

Private job-switching websites have recently gained popularity, reducing traffic at Hello Work offices.

According to the ministry, Hello Work’s employment cases fell by 42 percent from about 168,000 in 2014 to about 97,000 in 2024.

Employment figures from Hello Work underpin indicators, such as job-to-applicant ratios, that can serve as a basis for economic policy decisions.

(This article was written by Yuki Hanano, and senior staff writer Nobuya Sawa.)

Related News