Japan’s Atrae launches data-driven talent search platform in partnership with analytics giant

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See the original story in Japanese.

As we approach the end of the Japanese fiscal year, it’s quite understandable that there are plenty of accounting solutions being launched these days, but we are also receiving many updates about the launch of web services for human resources. So human resource technologies, or HR-Tech for short, may be one of this year’s biggest trends along with fintech (financial technologies) and IoT (Internet of Things).

Tokyo-based Atrae, previously known as I&G Partners, recently launched a new service for “mining” human resources in partnership with Japanese big data analysis company Brain Pad (TSE:3655). The service is called TalentBase and provides companies with easier access to a pool of talents by leveraging artificial intelligence and big data analytics.

When one signs up for TalentBase, one’s profile will be created on the platform including quantitative scores of skills from social, business, and engineering aspects, based on available information associated with the Facebook account. If one’s Facebook account is associated with any of the Japanese knowledge-sharing services such as QiitaGithub, and Creww, more accurate information will be accordingly provided to one’s business profile on the TalentBase platform.

TalentBase will create profiles for Facebook friends that one grants permission for third-party access to, so that the number of talent profiles will show exponential growth as the number of registered users increases.

On the other hand, the platform will learn the preference of companies seeking employees so they will keep choosing candidates that have the specifications required. Based on vectorized data of people’s business skills, the platform will choose and present the most recommended set of candidates from the pool who may satisfy the requirements for each of these companies.

Atrae director Toshiyuki Oka explained:

We have been prototyping TalentBase behind operating JobShare, our previous talent-seeking platform. As we were able to validate that it was functioning to some extent, we decided to launch a new platform on a revenue-sharing basis with BrainPad, the leading company in the Japanese data analytics sector.

Some functions from JobShare were incorporated into the TalentBase platform, where companies can use functions like job posting, job applications management and results screening for free. If a company wants to find people who are likely to match their needs or receive recommendations from the talent pool, they will be charged a monthly fee of 100,000 yen (or about $820) regardless of how many jobs they post or how many candidates they contact.

While many of the companies using the platform will be startups or IT companies, as a matter of fact all users having their Facebook accounts can create their profile on the platform, hence business and occupational categories are not limited. Atrae wants to acquire 5 to 10 companies using the platform for their hiring platform, in addition to increasing the volume of available user profiles for 10 million people by the end of April.

As DeNA’s venture capitalist James Riney recently pointed out in his blog post, we may not be very good at filling their resume without advisory assistance or appealing their potentials due to one’s own characteristics. In that sense, the trend in tactics for hiring recently entails use of the data-driven approach and artificial intelligence. This may suit the mentality of a typical Japanese person, as gathered from moves by services such as Talentio and Grooves.

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Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by Masaru Ikeda and “Tex” Pomeroy