Interview with Tom Pastorius, Head of Pacific Recruitment

Tom Pastorius, Head of Pacific Recruitment

  • What Country and City do you work in?

    New York City

  • What previous experiences with entrepreneurship and office management do you have?

    I grew up in a family-run business in Pittsburgh and I have been working at Projects Abroad for the last seven years. The company has tripled in size since then and expanded into 15 new countries since then. I have personally set up new offices in three new countries: Canada, Japan, and Australia.

  • What were differences and similarities in working in these three countries?:

    I was already familiar with British business culture from our headquarters and was interested to see how similar Canada and Australia’s business practices were to the UK’s. However, I found Japan to be more similar to the US in terms of office life, despite being an Eastern culture. Working in Japan was more of a challenge because you really need to trust your local advisors. I had actually never been to Japan or Australia before going there to set up offices, and I don’t speak Japanese, but the challenges go far beyond language issues.

    In Australia and Canada, the culture was different but I could still rely on my own intuition. However, in Japan, even when the words were translated for me, the customs underlying the words were not intuitive. I had to rely on my local advisors to interpret meanings.

  • How did you find qualified employees and how did you test that they would be good cultural fits with the home office?:

    Before going to any of the countries, I established connections. I started a specific website for each country and used a translator in New York to create it. I asked the translator to initiate contact with some obvious potential partners in our field, so that when I went, I already had meetings lined up.

    I hired someone before I got to Japan. I had already met her through professional contacts and we conducted a phone interview. We hired her provisionally as someone to get the office off the ground, but ended up so pleased with her that we asked her to stay on.

  • What was the biggest hurdle in creating an office that you faced?:

    Every country has a different set of employer obligations and mechanisms to help employers fulfill those obligations. It’s very difficult to meet all of those obligations across the board in different countries while also offering your employees a consistent set of benefits throughout the company. The secret is to clarify any discrepancies between benefits within the same company at the point of hiring.

    Most challenges are unexpected. There are always unexpected surprises or assumptions that fall apart. For example, in Australia, you have to ask permission from the tax authorities to have a fiscal year end on a date other than June 30. And in Japan, it’s very typical for companies to pay their employee’s home rents as part of their compensation, which is something I wouldn’t have known without advice.

  • What do you think is the biggest difference between the business culture of your country and that of the US/UK? How have you worked to bridge these differences?:

    Japan is a more hierarchical business environment than the US’s. In fact, the word “honcho” is originally Japanese. Whenever I call the Japanese office, they always refer to me as “the big boss”, which is so different from working with the UK or Canada.