Valuable and up-to-date HR advice from Jenny Wells, Ph.D., Clinical Director at TELL Community Counseling Service on hiring high-quality staff as a NPO.

Q: Tell us about your organization.
A: Tokyo English Life Line (TELL) is a registered non-profit organization that has been serving Tokyo’s international and Japanese communities for over 33 years.

The organization provides two main services. The first is the Life Line, which offers free crisis counseling and non-judgmental emotional support across Japan, as well as both routine and emergency resource information, 365 days a year. The Life Line received nearly 7,000 calls in 2006.

The second service is the community counseling service, providing individual, couple, child and family counseling by psychotherapists that are native English, Japanese, Spanish and German speakers. The community counseling service also provides a number of outreach services, including various mental health workshops and support services to corporations, international schools, hospitals and community-based groups.

Q: What types of people do you normally hire?
A: The TELL Community Counseling Service is staffed by professionals with a range of backgrounds in mental health, including psychologists, social workers and counselors. However, TELL is fundamentally a volunteer based organization that has an extremely diverse group of volunteers who work hard to keep TELL operational.

Those volunteers who wish to volunteer on the Life Line as telephone counselors must be native or near native English speakers and there are currently 75 telephone counselors with 15 nationalities represented.

Other TELL volunteers sacrifice free time to assist with administrative tasks, event planning, IT maintenance and other special projects. These volunteers are looking for opportunities to build upon their skills, enjoy the social aspects of volunteering and most of all, wanting to give something back to the community.

Q: As an NPO, what are some of the hiring challenges you face?
A: People in Tokyo lead busy lives and work and personal situations change often. The Life Line is open 365 days a year from 9am to 11pm and one of biggest challenge is maintaining sufficient numbers of telephone counselors to keep the line open during these times each day.

For this reason, TELL offers two 66-hour training programs per year for about 24 potential volunteer telephone counselors to ensure the Life Line is always there for the community. The training program application and recruitment process is a rigorous and time-consuming one but a vital and worthwhile undertaking for the community.

Q: Which feature on GaijinPot do you find most useful when recruiting?
A: By using GaijinPot, TELL can announce the telephone counseling training course to a wide group of people that we would not normally have access to.

Additionally having instant access to the resumes of applicants, enables us to readily learn a great deal about each applicant, such as their location, why they are interested in committing to volunteer work with TELL, along with other information such as what languages they speak and enabling us to make a more informed decision about the applicants suitability.

Q: What are some of the main reasons why people use your counseling service?
A: People use the TELL Community Counseling Service for a variety of reasons, including cultural adjustment issues, relationship difficulties, depression and anxiety, as well as acute mental health issues.

Our outreach services, such as child protection consultation and liaison with international schools, also provide a good source of support for the international community here in Tokyo. The main reasons for people calling the Life Line in 2006 included difficulties at the workplace, depression, loneliness, anxiety and relationship difficulties.

Q: Can you tell us about any future plans or activities?
A: We are just developing two new outreach programs. The first is our Workshops program. This program provides a platform for mental health issues to be discussed and information disseminated in various situations, such as corporations or schools.

The second new outreach program aims to provide a resource and referral service for children with special needs. Many parents in the international community of Tokyo attempt to find quality therapists for their children with special educational needs.

This program aims to establish and maintain a resource and referral list of professionals who serve children with special needs, as well as providing case management and assessment to help families determine the best course for evaluation and treatment for their children.