BY the age of 34, Akiko Naka has already experienced more career-wise than most people do in a lifetime.
She started by getting hired by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where she worked as an equity saleswoman. When she left that job, she tried to make it as a professional manga comic artist. When that didn’t work out, she landed a job at Facebook Inc.
And not content to leave it at that, she quit to establish her own company, a recruiting social network called Wantedly Inc. She took it public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last year, and is one of the youngest women to head a Japanese listed company.
Naka is an example of a young Japanese person who’s shunning what was long a standard career path in Japan—graduating from a top university and staking out a career at a major company. Instead, she’s going it alone, seeking to harness the power of social media—and her own past experiences—to try to reinvent how recruitment functions.
“All my failures were a chance to learn,” Naka said in an interview in Tokyo.
Wantedly, which is seen as a LinkedIn for millennials in Japan, is an online portal linking job seekers directly to companies. The platform, which also offers other services, is built around matching users and companies that have the same motivations, and it doesn’t allow job postings to mention salary or benefits. The focus is on what companies do, how they do it, and perhaps most important why.
Different era
“LinkedIn is from about two decades ago,” Naka said. The US company was established in 2002. “It was born in the era of paper résumés, and matching salaries and skills,” she said. “What we’re aiming to do is to match a company’s direction, what they are doing something for, with the user’s direction, and having them work together so that everybody benefits.”
According to Naka, that focus on motivation, and the company’s service of giving prospective employees a chance to visit companies on more casual terms, will ultimately lead to better matches than the traditional model of rounds of formal job interviews.
“If both companies and job seekers put on makeup when they are seeking to match, both of them will be unhappy in the end,” Naka said.
Shrinking work force
Finding talented people is getting difficult in Japan, where a shrinking work force is causing the tightest labor market in decades, giving job search companies an opportunity to expand their businesses. The market for recruitment information services grew to about $7.1 billion in fiscal 2016, up 7.5 percent from a year earlier, according to the Association of Job Information of Japan. Wantedly had 2.4 million monthly active users, with 29,000 registered companies using the service, as of October, according to the company. Wantedly aims to increase monthly active users to about 10 million in Japan within about 10 years, Naka said.
It’s still a drop in the ocean compared to LinkedIn, which has more than 575 million members in 200 countries and territories worldwide, according to the company’s web site.
Naka graduated from Kyoto University in 2008. During her time at the prestigious school, she helped establish a free campus newspaper that sold ad space to local shops and restaurants. She also worked on creating a beauty pageant, which never came to pass. As a child, her parents, who were academics, encouraged her to make things rather than play video games.