Every company struggles with hiring. Strictly speaking, every company wants excellent talent — or talent that fits.
Nothing affects company performance like good people.
It may be obvious, but hiring is an event every employee should take seriously.
Even so, only some companies have the CEO and executives truly racing to acquire talent, or building an org reporting straight to them for hiring.
As an exception, big-company new-grad hiring moves like a project on an annual schedule — but other hiring often feels like just one of HR's tasks.
I'm not in HR, so I don't know the specialized flow well, but the image is: understaffed teams request openings, job posts get written for various media, and the posting goes out.
Main hiring channels in Japan look something like this:
— Job media (Mynavi, Rikunabi, en tenshoku, Wantedly, etc.)
— Recruiting agencies (doda, Mynavi Agent, specialist agents, etc.)
— Own website
— Job portals (Indeed, Google for Jobs, etc.)
— Referral hiring (employee intros, inflow from employees' SNS, etc.)
Pricing and mechanics sometimes blur across media, but that's the basic breakdown. Pros and cons of each channel I'll leave for another time. This time I want to write about "the upside of hiring for free" — something I always keep in mind while involved in hiring work.
Of course, getting talent for free is better if you can.
But it's never only because "cost is zero."
(I'm not recommending hiring only through free channels. Excellent people exist across many channels.)
When I hire someone for free I'm genuinely happy — but when I tell colleagues, a fair number of people end the conversation at "good because it cost nothing," and that feels off to me.
Free hiring includes referral, hiring via your own site, portals like Indeed, and free (or partly free, in Wantedly's case) listing media.
Lately especially in the venture world, posting and pitching on Wantedly and similar free (or partly free) platforms has become more known, and hiring via SNS is becoming normal too.
Beyond cost, there are many upsides to hiring for free — but if I had to boil it to one: it strengthens your sense of acquisition.
I deliberately used a marketing-flavored phrase; here's the rough idea.
First, picture the hiring process flow.
Requirements (what kind of person you want, etc.) → acquisition (getting applicants) → screening → interview → selection → offer — that's the rough sequence.
Timing and length vary by company, but acquisition is usually upstream (early).
Handing that upstream piece off to outsiders on autopilot — probably to hit some application volume — is a waste.
In that state you're over-dependent on external platforms.
Some channels are still essential, but depending on job media and agents is like depending on "your company's sales agency."
Extremely put: "people won't come unless a third party sells how great you are."
Needless to say, a sense of acquisition matters a lot in business. It's not overstatement to say almost every task should connect to acquisition somehow.
Acquisition isn't only reaching customers directly. Great hires strengthen acquisition, and hiring itself is a form of acquisition — getting people to know how great your company is and choose you.
Because getting great people has huge impact for a company, of course you should put force into that acquisition.
And beyond "to get excellent people, let's depend on external platforms that bring many applicants," it's better to think "to get excellent people, doing acquisition ourselves is easier than leaving it outside."
In-house acquisition costs resources and hours, of course — but personally I wouldn't want to join a company that lacks that sense of acquiring new teammates.
Also, for clarity this post split things into "paid" and "free," but it doesn't have to be free.
For example, using paid ads for that acquisition is fine with me.
More precisely: whether you intend to put force into acquisition yourselves.
Conversely, if actions based on an acquisition mindset lead to a hire, even if it ended up paid, that can count as success.
I've written a messy stretch and it may feel a bit contradictory, so one more bit of explanation:
Referral hiring is "free" and "trustworthy because it's an employee's acquaintance," of course.
On top of that, there's value in the process of your own employees actually referring someone — and in the process of an employee (or related person) bringing someone through selection and closing them into joining.
When you run ads, there's value in the process of targeting a persona, spending on ads, reaching them, and connecting that to a hire.
Writing this, I've gotten a bit anxious about logical consistency — but hopefully it's clear that an in-house sense of acquisition matters.
Companies full of excellent people, and founders who can pull in excellent people through personal trust, almost always have that acquisition mindset.
To sum up, it landed on something abstract like "don't be passive — have a purpose," but don't forget to hold onto a sense of acquisition.
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