Tokyo Office Tour: Find your dream job with friends on Wantedly

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Wantedly CEO Akiko Naka
Wantedly CEO Akiko Naka

We recently featured Tokyo-based startup Wantedly as one of the nominees in last week’s CNet Japan Startup Awards. The company has taken an innovative approach to helping people in their job search, providing a platform that leverages your social graph to ensure you find a better fitting job. The ideas is, that by being introduced to jobs by friends and mutual friends, you have a higher chance if finding a job that you’ll love.

So far the platform has over 60,000 users and 1800 clients, which is not bad considering that they are just a year and a half old. Their team is growing, and they like to point out that they have brought on new members using the Wantedly platform. In addition to their multi-talented CEO, Akiko Naka, some of folks that I spoke to seem to have ridiculously impressive pedigrees, many coming from places like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Goldman Sachs [1].

Wantedly just recently moved into a new office on Meguro, and they were nice enough to allow me to bring my camera by and take some pictures. The office sits just adjacent to a beautiful park, giving the staff a pretty inspiring view, especially at this time of year with all the fall foliage still hanging around.

It will be interesting to see what kind of ideas they hatch from this new space. Given that there’s lots of English on their front page right now, I think we can expect Wantedly to make an overseas push in 2014 (or a push to neighboring Asian markets), although for the time being they aren’t saying much on that point. The team has more than a few fluent English speakers, so I think they’ll be far better prepared to go global than most other Japanese startups.

You can check out some of the photos below for a better idea of the layout of their new space, as well as a short video intro from the CEO [2].

wantedly-01
Wantedly office entrance: Ring the bell to say hi
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lounge space
Engineers at work
Engineers at work
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I’ve seen this dog somewhere before…
Engineers at work
More engineers at work
Engineer's super-keyboard of the future
Engineer’s super-keyboard of the future
Busy in the meeting room
Busy in the meeting room

  1. Akiko herself is ex-Facebook. But overall she’s a pretty remarkable talent, who in addition to being a programmer, has also dabbled with making her own manga. As we talked in her office, one of her paintings was propped against the sofa.  ↩

  2. It was really cool of her to give this video a try in English. Not many Japanese startups have dared to do that so far in our series.  ↩