I first heard about the Boston Career Forum, which was held this past weekend, during a trip to Tokyo earlier this year.

A Japanese colleague who had joined Bloomberg recently said he got recruited at the event, the largest job fair for Japanese-English bilinguals.

Bloomberg is one of the companies that attends, but mostly its Japanese firms. This year a total of 241 companies, including the Bank of Japan, participated.

My colleague explained that he was living in Tokyo at the time, but that it was easier to fly to Boston and get recruited than to apply for jobs locally.

He said companies would interview and extend offers during the weekend, while in Japan it could take months to go through layers of bureaucracy.

I thought it was an interesting example of how young, ambitious people get jobs and also how the “global” fintech labor market works.