Relatively young I.T. firms are now rethinking the conventional Japanese way of recruiting and training, trying new tactics instead: They are actively seeking employees overseas, using more English in the workplace, giving young workers more responsibility, and even acquiring top talent through takeovers and mergers with foreign companies.

Rakuten , which operates Japan’s largest Internet shopping mall, has been expanding its geographic reach overseas by buying online retail companies like Buy.com from the United States, Tradoria from Germany and PriceMinister from France. It has also decided to embrace English as its official language to foster better communication among its global units and increase organizational visibility for non-Japanese workers.

“If you don’t have full-scale policy regarding language, non-Japanese workers might feel excluded,” said Masayoshi Higuchi, vice department manager of global human resources at Rakuten. Mr. Higuchi said that in the last two years, when their new language policy was announced and instituted in a phased manner, there was an increase in the number of international employees.

This year, 70 out of 100 new hires in the engineering department were non-Japanese. In 2010, about 4 percent of the staff members at the parent company were foreign; that doubled to 8 percent in 2012.

“The language policy has had a significant impact” on our ability to conduct recruitment, he said.

Avinash Varma, 23, a graduate of the University of Mumbai, is one such promising employee who joined Rakuten in 2011.

He felt that Rakuten would be a good place to develop his career as a software engineer because, “I can obtain domain knowledge specifically of Internet shopping,” he said.

In India, the software engineering field is focused on outsourcing, he said. Although he had no prior knowledge of the Japanese language, he had no qualms about working for Rakuten, because the majority of staff in his department were international, including his American department manager.