Editor’s Note
**Editor’s Note:** Kishun Inc. has bolstered its workforce with 38 new hires in April 2024, including 28 recent graduates and 10 mid-career professionals. Despite industry-wide talent shortages, the company continues its steady recruitment and commitment to nurturing young talent.
In April 2024, Kishun Inc. welcomed 28 new graduates and 10 mid-career employees, totaling 38 new hires. While the jewelry industry faces a talent shortage, the company continues to recruit several new members each month and focuses on developing young talent.
The expertise required to assess gem value and purchase at appropriate prices is traditionally said to take over 10 years to master. However, Kishun has developed a proprietary training program covering gem identification, pricing, and current trends, enabling employees to acquire these skills in just six months. This allows the company to cultivate many young professionals.
For new graduate training, the company conducts a comprehensive six-month program covering various knowledge areas. In sales roles, employees visit purchasing stores nationwide and handle high-value items, making interpersonal skills and trust-building crucial. Therefore, training begins with etiquette lessons.
Alongside etiquette training, employees learn about colored stones, diamonds, and precious metals. Since most join with no industry experience or knowledge, the curriculum starts from basics—such as “What are diamonds and colored stones?”—and progresses to using identification tools, diamond grading, colored stone sorting, and metal assessment. This foundational knowledge is solidified over six months.
To revitalize the jewelry industry, often described as a declining sector, nurturing young talent is essential. By empowering young employees, the industry can achieve sustainable growth.
In the past, the jewelry industry had a culture of “learn by watching,” especially in gem polishing and processing, which rely on intuition. Some of Kishun’s craftsmen honed their skills under this tradition before joining.
At Kishun, the company adopts a philosophy of “veteran employees openly share all their knowledge” to train young staff. While independent thinking is encouraged, an environment exists where employees can ask veteran craftsmen for guidance. Japan’s gem polishers are declining and aging, but all of Kishun’s polishers are in their 20s. A 2023 new graduate, after six months of training, now handles cabochon cuts (dome-shaped gem surfaces) for opals and amethysts, reviving numerous used gems while preserving Japan’s delicate craftsmanship.
The jewelry industry, though glamorous, faces serious social issues such as forced labor, revenue exploitation, and CO2 emissions from mining in gem-producing countries. Kishun aims to transform this industry by creating new value from used colored stones previously considered “worthless.” The company handles everything from purchasing to sales in-house, establishing a business model that revolutionizes the jewelry industry. By adding value to these stones, Kishun extends its “reframing” approach beyond gems to unique employee benefits and women’s empowerment, continually generating new value. The company’s core philosophy is “Reframing Company,” meaning “seeing things in new frameworks without being bound by assumptions.”
