Wantedly will go public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on September 14

Japanese social recruiting startup Wantedly has successfully filed an application to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), its CEO and founder Akiko Naka confirmed to e27.

The company will list on the Mothers market of the TSE on September 14 this year. According to a report by The Bridge, Wantedly aims to offer about 80,000 shares — 50,000 for public subscription and 19,500 shares in over-allotment options.

Naka owns the bulk of the company’s shares (69.98 per cent). Its investors include CyberAgent; Shogo Kawada, Co-founder and advisor of DeNA, ; Shinji Kimura, the co-founder of news curation app Gunosy and payments platform AnyPay; The Nikkei newspaper; Masanori Sugiyama, Chairman and President of Zappalas; Managing Director of Enish, Kosuke Matsumoto.

Officially launched in 2012, Wantedly’s jobs platform aims to matches jobseekers to companies based on their social network.

Its algorithm harnesses social media networks to push job posts, so that a company’s job ads will not only be viewed by job seekers who chance upon the post, but also by people within the company’s employees’ social network.

Then, candidates and their potential employers will meet in a casual setting (for example, over coffee) so that both parties can get a feel of each other in a relaxed environment. This way, it is easier to gauge whether the candidate is a good cultural fit for the company. As a rule of thumb, CVs and salaries are not to be discussed during these meetings.

Also Read: Akiko Naka of Wantedly: On breaking ranks with traditional Japan and finding her true north

This novel recruitment concept has helped Wantedly grow to over 800,000 individual users. It also has 23,000 corporations on its platform and logs over 1.5 million unique users per month, according to The Bridge report.

The report added that Wantedly has accrued ¥840 million (US$7.7 million) in revenue as of August 2016. Of that sum, ¥77 million (US$1.1 million) is net profit.

Today, Wantedly has evolved beyond just social recruiting, offering complementary workplace and recruitment products such as Wantedly Visit, where prospective interviewees can visit the companies they wish to work at, and get to know the profiles of their employees.

It also has Wantedly Chat, a team chat app that works like Slack; and Wantedly People, an AI-based business card reading app that can analyse up to 10 business cards at once.

Last year, Wantedly expanded to Indonesia; this year, it launched an office in Singapore.

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Image Credit: Wantedly

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