Japan’s BizReach Proves that Top Jobs Listings are Worth Top Dollar [INTERVIEW]

Swimmy Minami (pictured right) is the co-founder of BizReach, a site that helps its users find senior level jobs that pay more than $100,000 annually. The interesting thing is that it charges users, rather than the conventional way of charging companies for posting jobs.

Although the business model isn’t a common one, it works well for BizReach so far. It turns out that people are willing to pay for exclusive and curated content like this. To date, BizReach has more than 5,900 senior level jobs postings attracting over 140,000 registered users in Japan. Swimmy has also recently launched RegionUp, a similar site targeting other Asia regions.

To find out more about BizReach, we managed to speak to Swimmy who revealed more about his startup.

1. What were you doing before BizReach?

I was one of the founders of the Rakuten Eagles, an expansion baseball club in the Japanese professional league. I played various management roles in starting-up the club, such as assistant general manager, assistant to the CEO, head of entertainment, and I represented the club in several league-wide business committees. Before my career in sports, I kicked off my career in Morgan Stanley’s investment banking department, where I was a financial analyst on Tokyo’s M&A advisory team. I later moved on to become a founding member of PCCW’s Tokyo investment team, where we made strategic investments in various parts of the world.

2. What is the BizReach story?

My goal was not to become an entrepreneur, but to look for opportunities to work on new business projects at a larger corporation, similar to the baseball team. I was talking to various headhunters to see if I could dig up any under the surface opportunities in the technology space, and had an extremely frustrating time with them. I met close to 30 headhunters over a one month period, and every single headhunter gave me a different position to consider.

The entire process puzzled me and the uncomfortable situation presented by headhunters. This situation rang some bells, and I immediately started doing research on the job market. Certain ideas led to others and I felt very strongly about individuals, or basically jobseekers, paying a certain fee for access to job-related information.

I love looking back at the history in the evolution of industries when I embark on a new business, and I quickly found out that jobseekers did indeed pay for job-related information until 15 years ago. Yes, job magazines and newspapers. I felt that as long as I could create an online platform where I could support jobseekers in efficiently and effectively collecting information that would help their job search process, they would indeed pay a certain fee for the service. We would become the first subscription-based jobs site in Japan.

I also took a look at the Japanese online job market and saw that the market consisted of four major mass-market job sites (similar to JobStreet or JobsDB in the APAC market). I am a big fan of new businesses serving a specific niche at the beginning stages, so in order to not become a direct competitor of these giants, I decided to differentiate ourselves by exclusively focusing on the senior-level job market (above annual salary of US$75K). We also became the first specialized job market in Japan focusing on the senior-level job market.

Through the initial founding stages of BizReach, I had seven other founders, who were all specialists in some online roles for other companies. The founders had experience working for firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Sony, MTV, and Recruit. Six of the founders actually decided to continue working for their respective companies, and drop all extracurricular activities on weeknights and weekends for one year to focus on starting up BizReach.