Our 5 Year Vision - Part 2: Marketing
Recruitment is broken. We’re on a mission to fix it.
However, we can’t do it without our candidates, clients, employees, investors or business partners. And since we are all about transparency, we decided to share our 5 year vision in a blog series with you.
Let’s fix recruitment together.
Our vision is centered around these 4 points and over the next several weeks different members of our leadership team will focus on each point individually.
Growth happens through a network of remote but connected recruiters.
Take risks and invest in Marketing - the future is inbound.
In part 2 Anju Kajihara, Marketing Manager, talks about, well, Marketing.
The Future is Inbound
Anju Kajihara, Team Leader | Marketing
Competition for talent in Japan, especially in tech, is at a peak. Talent shortage is real. In 2019 there were 1.60 job openings per applicant, meaning there are a lot more jobs than workers. The pandemic actually decreased that ratio, but this is projected to only be a short term effect due to many Covid related layoffs (it is still higher than 1 though). The job-openings-to-applicants ratio will increase again.
In the tech industry those numbers are especially high and on the rise. METI estimates that by 2030 there will be a gap of 789,000 software engineers, especially in new industries like AI or IoT. This doesn't just affect Japanese companies but the economy as a whole.
The demand is so high, that engineers get bombarded with scout messages from recruiters, both internal and external, on LinkedIn as well as other job boards; usually with email templates and a non-personalized message. This leads to lower open rates as well as response rates on job boards, so it becomes incredibly difficult to get hold of an engineer, even if you have the perfect opportunity for her. Calling is difficult too because a lot of people don’t answer their phones anymore; not even when they are lost in the mountains of Colorado.
Since the old days of calling into random companies, lying to the receptionist and trying to headhunt their employees, recruitment has always been an outbound business. However, due to the talent shortage we have seen a growing power shift from employers to employees. Skilled workers are well aware they are in high demand and they have more control over their own careers than ever before.
In this new era, job seekers are overrun with calls or emails from recruiters and the incentives to reply are quite low. It seems like the outbound business model is out of date. So how can we still add value to the job search process? By providing information and inspiring curiosity.
Recruiters have unique insights into both the broader market trends as well as what is going on in specific companies. Our job as recruiters is to share these insights with job seekers, so they can make the best decision for their careers; and my job as a marketer is to find our audience.
Inbound Marketing
That’s why we believe in the power of Inbound Marketing. Building brand awareness is crucial to be seen and, more importantly, to be remembered by potential job-seekers. We want to consistently appear in our candidates’ news feeds, time lines and home tabs with valuable information. Although one of the oldest concepts in marketing, the rule of 7 still applies. Potential candidates have to see our message at least 7 times before they engage with us.
For us that message is sent through content, not only about topics closely related to recruitment like interview tips or salary guides but also about broader topics such as market insights, industry trends, new product launches from our clients etc. If our audience sees us as industry experts on Japan’s tech market, they will remember us and come back to us when they consider a job change in the future. That’s the dream of every inbound marketer.
On a side note, having a strong brand also helps with outbound messaging. On LinkedIn for example, our scout messages have a 4 times higher response rate with people who have engaged with our content in the past. This clearly shows the importance of building an audience and engaging it through content.
Inbound Talent
When we talk about inbound in not a strictly marketing related term, we have to talk about immigration of foreign talent to the Japanese labor market as well. Although not a classic immigration country, actually far from it, foreign workers have increased in recent years and play a crucial role for Japan’s economy. Japan’s population as a whole as well as the labor force has been shrinking since 2011, which will inevitably have a negative effect on Japan’s GDP. While productivity improvements through digital transformation can counter some of the effects, Japan needs international talent to really close the gap.
Right now the pandemic has halted pretty much all immigration to Japan, but it will eventually come back. Pre Covid, Wahl+Case has helped a lot of foreign talent to land jobs in Japan, especially in technical positions, where the barriers of entry around language are the lowest. A lot of technical positions like software engineers or developers don’t require Japanese language skills and some Japanese tech companies like Rakuten have even changed their official office language to English.
Japanese companies are a lot more open to hiring foreigners than 10 years ago and Wahl+Case as a bilingual agency is well positioned to help foreign talent to find their next job in Japan. We expect the inbound talent market to pick up again once the pandemic is under control. This is why we create our content, at least most of it, in both English and Japanese.
Content is King
Bill Gates had already understood this in 1996 in his same name essay about the internet.
“The broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.”
Since Wahl+Case is not in the entertainment industry, we focus our content efforts on supplying information, although delivering that information in an entertaining way is important. It’s not just about the content itself but also how it’s presented. Nobody has time to consume boring content. You have to provide valuable information and present it in an entertaining way to build and keep your audience.
The goal of our content strategy is to help our audience with their job search and career progression and provide additional insights into Tokyo’s tech market, its businesses, latest developments as well as key people from that industry.
We have so much valuable information inside the heads of our recruitment consultants, each of them is an expert in a specific industry and/or certain positions. My job as Marketing Team Leader is to extract that information and turn it into digestible content for our audience.
“What skills do you need to excel in B2B sales for cloud services?” I will ask our Enterprise Tech Director Milos and write a blog article.
“Which programming languages are hot in Japan’s gaming industry?” I will talk to Bryan, Director of Wahl+Case’s technical and creative teams and make an infographic.
My role is like an amplifier. I make sure that our information reaches as many relevant people as possible.
We also feature a lot of our client companies and give them a platform. We publish a long form interview with a CEO, Founder or Executive every month to talk about their industry, business, products, company culture, work environment and more.
Our candidates really enjoy these because it gives them a different perspective on a company that they might want to apply for. In many cases, since we work with a lot of startups, they get exposed to new companies that have been founded recently or just entered Japan from overseas.
Another way our clients can utilize our platform and audience is through collaborations such as live webinars or events (in non-pandemic times). I might be repeating myself but the demand for bilingual tech talent is huge, so going through Wahl+Case to get their message out is an effective way for many of our clients, especially startups or lesser known companies that don’t have a strong employer brand in Japan.
If you want to get your company's story out, just get in touch with me.
Take Risks and Be Creative
The marketing landscape is ever changing. This is especially true for digital marketing where we focus most of our resources. Behavioral patterns of people and how they consume content are changing at a similar rate.
We have to stay up to date with the latest trends and new channels. If we only focus on what is working now, we will be in a bad place in a few years. Finding the right balance between working on what brings in results now and investing in the future is key.
We have to keep experimenting, testing and optimizing to stay ahead of the curve.
Taking risks and trying new things is something I expect from my team and I’m trying hard to build a culture of psychological safety. I don’t want my team members to not try something new because they are afraid to fail. If we fail, that’s OK and we have learned a valuable lesson along the way. And there will be a lot of failures down the road.
Let me give you a concrete example. In the past year we have experimented with new channels such as TikTok and Clubhouse. Whereas Clubhouse didn’t seem to work at all for us and we couldn’t get any audience, our TikTok channel is doing pretty well and is growing at a good rate.
This is very important to us because we are getting exposed to a younger audience and setting ourselves up for future success. We are starting to see a lot of potential for TikTok to become a lead generation tool for new candidates. This is also something that differentiates us from other recruitment agencies, since I haven’t seen any of our competitors on TikTok, yet.
Speaking of differentiation, we also started to produce video job descriptions for our clients’ jobs, including their company name. Traditionally recruitment agencies have been very secretive about who they work with because other agencies might “steal” their clients.
We have broken with that notion. We believe in the relationships we have with our clients and I see a lot of potential for these exclusive partnerships going forward. Both sides can invest more in each other, be less transactional and get better results. This will benefit the candidates as well.
Content form is another big point we have to constantly re-evaluate. Obviously, our company blog won’t go away any time soon, traditional SEO is still strong but video is a big focus of ours. We have our own in-house creative team with shooting and editing capabilities to create high quality video content. And video content is high in demand.
Actually 54% of users want to see more videos from the companies they support. Videos are also more beneficial in terms of delivering a message because 95% of that message is retained compared to only 10% in written content like blogs. That’s why we make different videos for different content pieces for various platforms and audiences: Position explainers for candidates, onboarding advice for clients, some employer branding for potential hires. Check our Youtube channel to see more. We also launched a podcast recently if you are more into audio only content.
Going forward we will continue to invest in our marketing, it’s one of Wahl+Case’s five pillars for the future and will contribute to our growth over the next five years. There is always room to be better or different than our competitors; and we will find that room and occupy it.
We are changing what is expected of recruitment companies in Japan and globally to fix a broken industry.
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