Benkyokai

Leading with Passion and Values: Changing Japan’s Job-Seeking Landscape

Wantedly is a social hiring platform that allows companies and talents to meet based on shared mission, vision, and passion, rather than salary and benefits.  Wantedly has disrupted the job-seeking market by using machine learning to create a recommendation system to achieve better matching between work and workers.  Within two years, Wantedly has changed the hiring process in Japan.  While LinkedIn still dominates the career networking market globally, Wantedly is on par with it in Japan.

February’s Benkyokai Webinar featured Akiko Naka, Founder and CEO of Wantedly, to share how she’s led the Tokyo-based startup to “Create a World Where Work Drives Passion”.

Following its official launch in February 2012, Wantedly grew to 2.7mil users and 37,000 companies, and has become the leading professional social-networking service in Japan. Akiko Naka took the company public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2017, and is one of the youngest women to head a Japanese listed company. Prior to Wantedly, she was a growth coordinator at Facebook Japan and in equity sales at Goldman Sachs.