The Bossjob team
In July, the Philippine-based career platform Bossjob announced its plan to enter the Japanese market. The plan will include the provision of a limited-time free policy to assist Japanese companies in recruiting talents from different countries through an enhanced user experience with its AI + direct chat model.
“Japanese companies exhibit a high demand for talent. We aim to meet this need by providing efficient talent services that prioritise superior user experience,” says Bossjob co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Garcia in a press statement.
Prior to its expansion to Japan, Bossjob entered Singapore and Indonesia and is preparing to enter Hong Kong in Q3 2023.
Founded in 2018, Bossjob offers an MDD model of “mobile + direct chat + AI-matching,” introducing direct chat into the recruitment scene. With the help of AI technologies and big data, the platform recommends highly suitable and active candidates to employers and relevant job opportunities to job seekers.
In this email interview with e27, Garcia explains in detail about the company’s expansion plan and the role it plays in its growth. The following is an edited excerpt of the interview.
Can you tell us about the process of how Bossjob decided that Japan is the ideal destination to expand its services to?
The talent gap in Japan is growing year by year. On the other hand, international talent competition is also increasingly fierce. Especially in the IT sector, a survey published by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry estimated the demand for IT talent would continue to expand. Meanwhile, Japan’s labor force, especially the young population, is expected to decrease, and it is estimated that by 2030, the IT talent gap will reach about 790,000.
The introduction of foreign talents has become one of Japan’s growth strategies. The government has expressed the necessity to accept foreign talents with advanced knowledge and skills to accelerate Japan’s productivity and innovation. On June 9, the Japanese Cabinet approved a plan to expand the “Specific Skills 2” residence status, which skilled foreign workers can acquire, from the current two fields to 11 fields. This suggests that more foreign talents will be accepted in the future.
Bossjob has been serving the SEA market for more than seven years. Based on our data, we have observed an increasing trend in Japanese companies recruiting talents on Bossjob. Before entering the Japanese market, many Japanese companies, such as EQUINIX, % Arabica, and IPS Co., have been using Bossjob, primarily recruiting international talents for the Southeast Asian market. Therefore, after Singapore, Hong Kong, and Indonesia, we chose Japan as the next stop for Bossjob’s internationalisation.
How does expanding to Japan differ from Singapore and Indonesia? What preparation do you need to make?
The job market in Japan leans toward the conservative side, being dominated by numerous established recruitment agencies. This makes it challenging to penetrate the traditional market. However, in recent years, the rise of emerging industries such as the internet and blockchain has opened new doors for us, presenting fresh opportunities and markets. In Japan, we mainly aim to cover emerging incremental markets that have yet to be tapped by traditional channels.
On the other hand, the Southeast Asian (SEA) market is quite diverse and fragmented. Our strategy in this region is to concentrate on servicing pivotal businesses and demographics. For instance, in Indonesia, an emerging nation with a geographically dispersed market and a lower GDP, we direct our energies toward catering to key enterprises.
In the process of globalisation, our priority is to localise our products. We gear up for handling multiple languages and configurations and building local teams.
What potential challenge do you anticipate? How do you plan to tackle this?
One of the most significant hurdles we encounter while trying to penetrate the Japanese market is the entrenched business relationships between existing recruitment players and corporations, which makes gaining a foothold in the established market quite challenging. Consequently, we’ve chosen to strategically concentrate our efforts on Japan’s high-growth emerging industries like IT and blockchain for our next key growth directions.
Can you tell us the profile of your users in Japan and your user acquisition strategy to reach out to them? Do you have any specific target for your first year in Japan?
The Japanese market represents both a challenge and an opportunity for Bossjob, requiring a strategy that strikes a balance between assertive market penetration and cultural respect. The market is relatively conservative, and users prefer localised products.
At the current stage, we hope Bossjob will serve as a bridge between international talents and Japanese companies in the Japanese market. So far, Bossjob has over 2.9 million registered users, which is the successful first step for us in entering the Japanese market. After entering the Japanese market, we will offer free policies for corporate clients aiming to stimulate a surge in our corporate client base.
Our user growth strategy is multi-faceted:
Firstly, there is our product strategy. We continuously innovate and improve, adopting the “Mobile+Direct Chat+AI Matching” (MDD) innovative model, which introduces online chat into the recruitment scene. Leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence algorithms and big data, we provide highly matched candidate recommendations to employers and offer job recommendations to job seekers. This improves the precision of matching between them, enabling users to experience more efficient recruitment. This is the core of our sustained user growth.
Additionally, the Japanese IT industry is a late-mover market, and comparable players are rare. Our strategy is to achieve wide coverage first and then wait for the market to develop to a certain scale before implementing advanced paid features.
Secondly, there is our marketing strategy. We will focus on the pain points and preferences of Japanese users and corporate clients, continuously investing in brand awareness, social traffic, and word-of-mouth referral.
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What support do you get from your partners and investors in this expansion process?
Our partners and investors have continuously been supportive and are optimistic about Bossjob’s globalisation efforts. The specific details of their support are not convenient to disclose at the moment.
What is your big plan for 2023 apart from the expansion?
Our strategic blueprint for 2023 is centred on enhancing our core competencies and fortifying our technology and data barrier for future growth. The goal is to ensure our sustained ability to provide service to businesses and individuals worldwide, have the unique capability to serve corporations across the region and have an edge over our competitors in solving core issues for our clients.
As Bossjob navigates its plan for globalisation, we aspire to further augment our capacities in key areas: commercial viability, scalability, and the ability to continuously iterate and innovate. We are committed to maintaining an adaptable and forward-looking approach that will enable us to thrive in the evolving global business environment.
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Image Credit: Bossjob
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