Kazuki Yamane, Founder and CEOPotentialight is a game-changer in the Japanese recruitment sector, eliminating business barriers by equipping clients with innovative recruitment methods and strategies, and tactics planning services for hiring top talent. Deeply resonating with the motto of helping ventures thrive, Potentialight offers recruitment branding and support services for startups across Japan through its HR consulting expertise. It also operates as a recruitment agency for candidates, understanding their strengths, interests and characteristics to help them find their dream jobs.
Under its HR consulting wing, it also offers recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and HR organization support. Its recruitment branding and support service lineup is diversified to offer recruitment marketing through promotional articles, enhancing scout emails and building relationships with recruiting agencies.
“While behemoths such as Netflix, Uber, Google and Facebook have all rapidly expanded globally, Japan has not produced companies of similar quality in the past two decades due to recruitment challenges,” says Kazuki Yamane, founder and CEO. “Using our deep-rooted recruitment expertise, we support the emergence of industry giants in Japan and other Asian countries.”
The Icon of Recruitment Acumen
The Japanese approach to HR often involves a key focus on business and HR technologies, media platforms, and hiring methods. Out of these, recruitment method is the most critical aspect for hiring top talent amid an aging population and intense competition.
Through over 50 expertly crafted methods, Potentialight attracts and recruits highly skilled professionals such as IT experts or marketers for numerous clients. It has garnered extensive experience in creating recruitment know-how and sets trends to introduce the world to new ways of hiring.
Potentialight’s method is tailored for modern Japanese companies by considering all salient factors, including cultural differences. Not limiting its method and knowledge to Asia, the team is globalizing it to help clients overcome recruitment challenges with a much larger pool of skilled professionals.
The recruitment method—framework of attraction— highlights a client’s strengths, including organizational culture, value proposition, innovation and mission statement. By showcasing a client’s market position, it captures the interest and attention of job seekers and boosts the possibility of a client recruiting a talented candidate.
Evolving Ps—Powerful Recruitment Framework
Potentialight has continually explored the framework since its inception, to achieve the current 4P recruitment model known as 6P + SMC GODB, includes attractiveness items such as phase, product, philosophy, person, profession, privilege, strategy, market, culture, growth, operation, data, and brand. This framework has fundamentally changed the employer attractiveness for job seekers, and has provided Potentialight with a stellar track record of helping over 300 companies in their recruitment branding endeavor.
When providing recruitment branding services, the team begins by conducting two intensive, one-hour interviews with the client’s board of directors and senior executives. It poses strategic questions to uncover a company’s qualities and strengths. These include mission and vision to showcase how it is poised to achieve it, the distinctive purpose driving the organization and the competitive edge with regards to business or product.
The team delves deeper into a company’s fundamental strengths by inquiring about the core competencies, the industry’s growth rate in Japan and its status overseas. Finally, it zeroes in on a client’s differentiating factors.
Clients can focus on their core business while we take charge of their recruitment processes
Gathering ‘attractiveness items’ is only one half of the equation. The information clients share during interviews must be crafted into an effective attractiveness profile, regardless of the speaker’s ability to articulate the facts. Potentialight’s recruitment branding service achieves this through its specialized IFA (Important – Fact – Attract) framework.
It also determines the positive discomfort, a fact that may initially seem positive but indicates potential problems. While a resignation rate equaling 50 percent is a negative discomfort, having a zero retirement rate for the last three years is a positive discomfort because even though it suggests employee stability, it indicates issues like lack of career progression, burnout or an aging workforce that often does not make way for new talent. It compares the attractiveness framework for recruitment branding and notes the positive discomfort. It consolidates the information by organizing the list of positive discomforts and client responses.
As the next step, Potentialight uses the framework to categorize clients’ strengths and weaknesses. Defining attractiveness from a comparative or rare value perspective involves further evaluation of these items against market standards. Each attractiveness item undergoes detailed sub-categorization to generate an attractiveness score, deciding the client’s position on a scale in each category, with Level 1 denoting the lowest and Level 4 the highest.
There is possibly no other provider in Japan and not many in the world that has developed such a nuanced framework to categorize items systematically and explore them extensively.
The final piece of the attractiveness puzzle is to bring out the attractiveness to prospective candidates. Despite the definition of an attractiveness score, putting it into writing remains daunting. To deliver this insightful information to candidates in an effective way, it uses a proprietary tool that summarizes client information and presents it creatively, including crafting appealing job descriptions.
Where Expertise and Excellence Meet
Creating a world where the spotlight is on startups, it goes beyond being a mere professional HR services provider and becomes a true partner in clients’ journey to recruitment success.
“Clients can focus on their core business while we take charge of their recruitment processes,” says Yamane.
In one instance, Potentialight engaged with a large Japanese beverage company that was looking to hire IT engineers. Since the client was unable to articulate the appeal of their recruiting activities from various perspectives, they had less number of applications and witnessed a low recruitment rate. In order to hire fewer than 100 IT engineers per year, the client was tasked to develop a strategy and implement a variety of measures. The Potentialight team tackled the challenge through a different approach. It recognized the need for engineers to understand why the beverage company required IT professionals, to motivate them to join.
The team created a proposal for recruitment branding and conducted a long interview with the president of the beverage company. It also held interviews with the head of the corporate planning department, the head of the IT division and the head of the administration department to glean insights into their company’s strengths. Alongside, it extracted the client’s appeal from a variety of angles and designed an attractive, comprehensive deliverable for recruitment branding.
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Using our deep-rooted recruitment expertise, we support the emergence of industry giants in japan and other asian countries
Potentialight then created a PowerPoint presentation, articles on attractiveness and a list of the client’s 10 attractive points. It also developed a system to convey the information to candidates in an appealing way. After collaborating with Potentialight, the client witnessed an 8-time increase in their number of applications in just three months, with 15 IT engineers showing interest in joining.
With customer-centricity at its core, Potentialight is continually updating its method for the Japanese HR industry to support startups. Since its foundation, it has published 350 recruitment and HR know-how articles and over 520 blog posts, setting the standard for recruitment and job transition trends and knowledge rather than following them.
Committed to contributing to the growth of the country by encouraging entrepreneurship, the company creates the benchmark for venture recruitment and job transfers. HR trends of Japanese startups today is shaped by Potentialight – the name synonymous with the wave of positive transformation in recruitment.
Geared toward a promising future, the company is expanding its recruitment method and knowledge overseas. With deep roots in the Japanese HR industry, Potentialight excels in helping startups worldwide advance their business with expert recruitment methods and optimized practices.
