Private Musings: Contemplating Wantedly's user ROI and Value.
If you listen to the hype about platform economics and artificial intelligence, it sounds as if it is getting easier and easier to derive business value by having a digitally native business model, more data and newer technology. The truth is, translating data into insights is hard, and translating insights into new experiences and sustainable value with technology is much harder still.
(Updated 2020.1.22)
My First 30 days.
Pique by ‘social recruiting’, I decided to try out Wantedly’s platform in late December of 2019 and as of the end of this week, it will be my one month anniversary. Having investing time and injecting personal data into Wantedly, it's time to take a step back and do some evaluation. Putting on the persona of a job seeker who is actively interviewing, I am keen to find out whether Wantedly is right for me.
Japan is clearly Wantedly's sweet spot.
Wantedly is currently monetizing from the companies using their platform and have also found ways to upsell services as well. Their revenue model is straight forward and if one were to scry the health of their business, you just have to start by analysing the number of recruiting companies over time. The company does not disclose information such as churn or the average value of each paying customer but with sufficient snapshots, we should be able to build a simple model.
Wantedly has microsites for 16 countries worldwide and they are currently active in three, namely Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. The following snapshot (figures below) was generated from crawled data. Job postings from Japan definitely outstrips the other two emerging international markets.
Raw company count without adjusting for duplicates within and across regions. The % of recruiting companies will change depending on the quality of the denominator. Figures on the right chart are the number of recruiting companies by country. Based on the snapshot of the two markets outside Japan, job postings are 1.6 times (Hong Kong) and 2.1 times (Singapore) respective to the number of recruiting companies. Snapshot of Companies on Wantedly in January of 2020.
Wantedly still have some way to go for their international markets. After a month of experimenting and observing, let's just say that I have found that jobs on Wantedly's Japan site to be the most interesting and relevant (disclaimer: purely my personal opinion and preference).
The narrative economics of 'Visit'.
Linkedin is the de-facto leader in professional and business SNS, having built strong solutions and services to serve users and businesses globally. It is worth noting that Linkedin monetizes both users and businesses by utilizing a freemium model. Conversely, Wantedly is currently only tapping on recruiting companies. Wantedly's value centers primarily around 'Visit' and this narrative helped differentiate the company in Japan. Outside Japan, although Linkedin has much greater penetration and adoption, the concept of 'Visit' is still something fresh that Wantedly can capitalize on.
For both graph, I left out networking or community events as they fall under activities for multiple value bubbles. For Wantedly, I did not consider touchpoints such as Tools and Case. Comparing Linkedin vs Wantedly.
From my persona's standpoint, I am still on the fence about the ROI and open to more sampling. The graph depiction definitely needs fine-tuning and the company does have some cool ideas. However, my persona is leaning towards investing in other social recruitment platform for practical reasons.
While receiving recommended matches consistently is good and serves to keep users engaged, I sense that the ability to execute around 'Visit', which is the company's main draw, seems lacking. So far, visit requests to get to know the companies first or interact with teams I am interested in online was muted. As a result, the active jobseeker in me would rate my experience on Wantedly so far as neutral at best.
It my mind, Wantedly will want to focus on both customer intimacy and operational excellence「2」or at least hit a desired balance and threshold. I hope to get excited by the incremental user value on offer as the company innovates and improve.
A wise man once said, "We always over-estimate what we can do in ONE year, but greatly underestimate what we can achieve in TEN years." How will the narrative unfold? Who knows. Maybe the day will come when Wantedly's Visit is the yellow pages (I am betraying my age here) for business culture and ideas, potentially even featuring company ESG「3」impacts as companies using Wantedly sucessfully grows with them.
References:
「1」Company count without adjustments. Based on observation, 7% are duplication. We can still further trim it down by crossing out companies with multiple entries.
「2」The Value Disciplines of Market Leaders.
「3」ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance.
