Our 5 Year Vision - Part 3: Tech
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.
Use Tech to improve the quality of our work.
For part 3 we interviewed Bryan Cheng, Managing Director of Wahl+Case, about our use of technology.
Our Relationship with Tech
Bryan Cheng, Director
How would you describe Wahl+Case’s relationship with technology?
Our relationship with technology is deeply rooted in our company DNA. We are a recruitment agency specialized in tech. We work closely with a lot of startups as well as established global companies in various sectors within Japan’s tech industry. Tech is who we are.
A lot of people might not know this but we are a tech company ourselves. We have our own HR tech SaaS product called Attuned, an AI based intrinsic motivation software. Attuned (formerly FLOW) was launched in 2017 in its current form and has seen tremendous growth both in Japan and internationally, vastly expanding our own product, design and engineering teams.
We also had an online job board focused on startups called Justa, which we developed in-house. However, currently we are focusing all our technical resources on Attuned, where we see the greatest potential.
You can see that our relationship with tech goes very deep. We have been experimenting with chatbots and other digital solutions that could help our business in the past as well. Our motto is to balance the EQ of consulting with the IQ of technological innovation to make everything about employment, from discovery to matching to retention, completely frictionless.
Did this relationship with tech help Wahl+Case to get through the pandemic relatively intact?
100% it did. A lot of companies had tremendous issues to shift to a remote working environment. For us, the transition went fairly smoothly.
Everyone already had a notebook and a phone app. Our database and CRM systems have been in the cloud ever since we started the company in 2010 and can be accessed from anywhere and any device. We don’t have a VPN that restricts access to any of our tools and systems that our employees need to work. Everyone could do their jobs from home without any major limitations.
The only thing worth mentioning is that people need a stable internet connection with enough data which was an issue for some of our employees who were using pocket wifis or tethering options.
And then there are the common issues like zoom fatigue or voice quality issues with VoIP solutions compared to regular desk phones. Otherwise, our transition to remote work has been very smooth.
Our past investments in technology paid off big time, although they were never intended to be used like this. We introduced all these solutions to offer a more flexible and productive work environment. I’m glad it worked out like this.
Use Tech to improve our Quality of Work
Going forward, what kind of new tech are you interested in implementing?
Generally speaking, we are constantly looking into solutions for three areas: process automation, data & analytics, training & education. We have discovered that the best utilization of technology is mainly for internal purposes. Everything that is targeted at outside parties like clients or candidates has been really hard to implement. Getting buy-in is hard and adjusting to all the products that people are already using is almost impossible.
So we are aiming to use technology to improve our internal systems and workflows. We are interested in everything that improves our consultant’s work. Our goal is to implement one new tool, solution or service every year to increase productivity and efficiency. This year for example we rolled out 15five, a performance management software. This has helped a lot with objectives setting, tracking results and weekly 1on1s. I’m sure Kristine will write more about this in her article about “Fostering a Culture of opportunity and professional growth”, which is coming up in a few weeks.
Me personally, I’m really interested in interview scheduling solutions, like chatbots for example. Interview preparation for candidates is really important and needs to be done by our consultants but the scheduling can be automated soon. This would free up a lot of time that we rather spend talking with our candidates and clients. We actually tried to develop our own chatbot a few years ago that would schedule interviews between candidates and clients via the LINE app, but that never got released.
Another thing I would like to focus more on is to analyze consultants’ performance data. We have all our data stored in Talent Rover which is a CRM built on the Salesfoce.com platform, but the reporting and data visualization options are a bit limited. So I’m looking into BI or data tools that can be integrated with our current platforms to get deeper and more actionable insights into the large amounts of data we are tracking.
It sounds like Wahl+Case is focusing a lot more on tech solutions than other firms of comparable size. Why?
Although recruitment is in the professional services industry, we are at our core a tech company. We have our own product and we are trying to build more ways to integrate Attuned with Wahl+Case so that our candidates and clients can benefit from it.
Wahl+Case is the only recruitment agency that offers a deeper understanding of intrinsic motivation as part of our holistic introduction process, allowing for all new insights and the most accurate talent recommendations. This really differentiates us from other recruitment agencies and gives us a competitive advantage.
More generally, we have to be very open minded regarding tech and always try out new things. One major focus is our new hybrid work environment and we are looking into tools that help us work more effectively with remote and non remote workers.
The mindset is important. Don’t shut down new ideas but instead try many different things and assess what’s working. There are always new ways to improve our consultants’ work. How can we help them?
One thing I’d like to point out is that this is not a top-down approach. Everyone is encouraged to test new tech and if it’s something that might work on a larger scale, we can roll it out to the rest of the company. Of course, not everyone is interested in this but we listen to and rely on our innovative consultants. They always look for something new and potential changes to make their jobs easier.
Any last words, Bryan?
We use technology to help and support our employees with their work. If it’s something that can save time, we’ll implement it. We just have to be careful to not lose our human touch. Our relationships with our clients and candidates are our biggest assets. Tech can do a lot of things but it can’t build deep, mutually trusting relationships, at least not yet.
As a company we have to stay open minded. Many people don’t like change because it can be uncomfortable in the beginning but we have to keep exploring new ways to do our jobs. Work itself is ever evolving and we want to stay ahead of the curve. To achieve this we identified technology as one of our main pillars to build our future on.
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