See the original article in Japanese

Tokyo-based startup Leading Mark, announced on November 5th that it has launched an alpha version of Recme, an online platform that aims to create a more efficient recruitment process. The company also announced that it has raised 50 million yen from CyberAgent Ventures.

Leading Mark is a startup that Yuji Iida founded while he was a student at Tokyo University. The company organizes recruitment fairs, having succeeded in attracting more than 15,000 students from prestigious universities in Japan and China, with about 1000 students for each event. Their clients include major companies, providing them with recruitment consulting services as well.

According to a survey, the rate of the university students’ satisfaction with their employer at the time of their job offer is 82.6%. But that drops to 16.6% after start working at the companies [1]. In Japan, the average number of companies that students approach during their job hunt is over 100. That means for recruiters less than 1% of students they meet will actually join the company. Leading Mark aims to reduce this mismatching between recruiters and students by providing a platform for students to showcase their strengths through video.

We call this new style of job-hunting with a video ‘Dokatsu’ [2]. We don’t think Dokatsu can replace the entire recruitment processes, because certainly companies need to meet the applicants in person eventually. However, we believe Dokatsu can play a role during the first and second interviews. We think applicants’ videos will help hiring teams find some characteristics that they don’t notice when they screen paper applications. Students can either make videos that feature their strengths and then submit them to companies, or create videos on demand from companies.

The rate for corporate clients for each successfully matched student is 600,000 yen. They also offer clients white-label ASP products at the rate of 30,000 yen. They will start their service on December 1, the usual start date for job-hunting by university students in Japan. They plan get 50 startups and 25 major large companies on Recme.

There are similar businesses outside Japan, such as HireVue (see below), a popular service in the United States. That company raised 53 million dollars from 2009 till 2013. In Japan, so we expect there should be more room for growth as companies increasingly turn to video for recruiting. Rakuten, aiming at expanding in the global market, is one of them.

Leading Mark wants to have 100 corporate clients and 10,000 student users in its first year.