Line expands yet again, wants to help young people find a job

Line, the popular messaging app, certainly is not taking any chances when it comes to securing additional revenue flow. On top of the various services announced and launched in the past six months (music, epayments, taxi booking, to name just a few), the company is now going into a joint venture with HR fim Intelligence. The new product announced today is Line Baito. Baito is an informal Japanese term for part-time work.

The company operating Baito will be called Aube, co-established by Line and Intelligence. Unlike previous joint ventures such as Line Manga, Line will not have a majority stake in Aube. Of the JPY 300 million (US$2.55 million) in starter capital, Intelligence provided 51 percent. Since Intelligence dates back to 1989 and already has a large following in Japan, its bargaining position was likely a bit stronger than Line’s, which has a still-unproven track record when it comes to connecting the messaging app’s users to businesses.

The companies intend to create a product that will offer a “never before seen kind of applicant/business matching.” If that is true, here’s hoping it has finely-tuned user controls. A major criticism against most HR sites is their steady stream of updates can seem like spam. Having the ability to get direct messages from potential employers is only good if the amount, quality, and duration of those messages can be tightly controlled. How it will be integrated with the existing Line business account product also remains to be seen.

Aube and Line Baito will go live sometime in February and Line’s future CEO, Takeshi Idezawa, is looking forward to it. “Young people in their teens and twenties are looking for work and they also use Line a lot […] by having a joint venture with Intelligence, we can provide a new value to our users,” he said today in a statement.

See: With ambitious expansion beyond messaging, Line makes 5 new enemies