Wantedly: Japan’s Trust-based Social Recruiting Site Officially Debuts

On Monday, a Tokyo-based tech startup called Wanted officially released its social recruiting platform Wantedly. The service was developed by ex-FBer Akiko Naka and her buddy Gaku Hagiwara, and it allows employers to find potential employees by showing them how they would work in the company with possible future colleagues.

We had a chance to interview the startup’s co-founder and CEO Naka and asked her a little bit more about the service, as well as some of the details behind it.

Wantedly originally launched as a platform to find like-minded co-workers for projects. Did you pivot from this to make it to a social recruiting platform?

When we launched the website at first, we intended to see how many people were interested in our service and how the demographic looked. We wanted to see it in the beta phase.  We got 12,000 users and confirmed that the largest part was entrepreneurial individuals aged from 25 to 34.

There are a number of web services that help people find jobs and help employers find talent.  What made you decide to launch the service into that space?

From my point of view, Linkedin, which is often quoted as one of the best-known options for recruiting, is an online resume and works well for job seekers to introduce themselves to potential employers and for talent seekers to find potential employees. Likewise for online job board sites.  In order to give our clients opportunities to find high-skilled talents, our approach is to reach people who are neither seeking jobs nor interested in changing their jobs.

We would be grateful if the service can help more people learn about other jobs that they have never seen before.  We want to call it a job version of AirBnB. This does not focus on introducing users to our clients but making a web-based catalog that showcases jobs from clients which will get users’ attention. We’ve strictly chosen which companies can be featured on the website, and they are basically organizations we know well and believe in. We do not deliver money but rather the culture of our clients to the users.

The service is available via Facebook authentication, and only corporate users which have reached the startup’s standard are allowed to make posts for gathering people (from among individual users) for having power lunches, inviting co-workers, organizing hackathons, and offering contact-based jobs. If you are interested in joining a task or a project described in the post, you can raise your hand by pressing the ‘apply button.’ Some projects are open only to the users who have a Facebook friend working with the company who has posted, which improves the quality of each post and makes users more comfortable when applying.