Running Wantedly Well: Getting Applications from a Standing Start

Wantedly has drawn attention in recent years as a low-cost tool for hiring. Running it properly, though, can look daunting in terms of internal time and know-how.

This article shares know-how for exactly that situation, so your existing staff can do the work with as little time as possible.

1. Running Wantedly, step ①: preparation

To start with,

① Creating staff accounts
② Preparing photographs
③ Building out the company page

is the order we recommend preparing in.

Creating staff accounts

Wantedly is structured so that you create a company account and staff accounts separately, then link them together.

Start by getting as many staff as possible to create their own accounts.

Someone who visits your company page will wonder what sort of people work there and move on to the individual pages. Thin content at that point does not help, so we recommend filling each personal page with a reasonable amount of information.

When creating a personal account on Wantedly, following the guidance shown above will get you a solid result.

One point to watch: use a photograph of the person’s face wherever you can.

Once the personal accounts exist, link them to the company account.

Preparing photographs

Next, the photographs.

On Wantedly you mainly need photographs for the following.

• Cover photograph
• Job post thumbnails
• Story thumbnails
• Portfolio thumbnails
• Images placed within a post

People often click a post because of its photograph, much as they do with a YouTube video, so photographs matter if you want more clicks.

Photographs like the following tend to lift the click rate, so get them prepared and swap them in as they become available.

• Men and women appear together
• Natural light (sunlight) comes in and the shot is bright
• Taken outdoors with greenery in frame
• The people are smiling
• A stylish feel

Search for ‘Wantedly ranking’ and look at the photographs used by the companies at the top of the ranking page: most of them meet at least one of these points, so they are worth a look.

On that basis, if you can, set aside a day for a shoot with the help of your staff and prepare at least ten photographs that meet one or more of these points.

Building out the company page

Fill in the values and members sections you can set on your own Wantedly page.

You can register up to six values, in the style shown above.
All this needs is text.

Here, we recommend that someone who understands the company’s values fills in all six and writes five or six lines for each.

You can show up to four members on the company page.

These four are chosen from the personal accounts linked to the company account.

Hovering over a member shows the profile set on that staff account, so writing those profiles properly matters.

After that, group the staff accounts (lower part of the image above). Usually you create a group per team or department.

If you want to hire for several roles through Wantedly, the people a new hire would work alongside differ by role.

The point is to make that clear when a candidate interested in a particular role wonders what the people already doing it are like.

2. Running Wantedly, step ②: writing the posts

Once that preparation is done, you write the job posts, the stories and the portfolio.

Writing the job posts

Applications come from people reading these, so this is where to put your effort.

Where your existing website, recruitment pages or job platforms already carry the content, use that as your basis.

Four points matter above all, and they are set out below.

① Make the title catchy
② Use loanwords in the job title
③ Avoid jargon in the post and write in a way that widens the door
④ Use the good photographs described above as the thumbnail and within the post

For ①, look at the job posts of the companies at the top of the ranking.
The knack is a short line that makes the reader feel there is something in it for them.

For ②, examples would be writing a role as ‘sales’ rather than the plain Japanese word, or ‘back office’ rather than ‘clerical work’.

Writing stories

Stories are free-form posts, used mainly to introduce staff or carry staff interviews.

Choosing the subject matters; the post has to make the company look attractive to a candidate.

The following three subjects in particular tend to lead to applications, so we recommend writing these three first.

• Employee interviews
• A conversation between two members of staff
• A conversation between the chief executive and a member of staff

Wantedly also has a ranking for stories on their own, and we recommend building the outline of your story with that ranking in view.

Our ownstory, a conversation between the chief executive and a member of staff, shown in the image above,followed the outline below.

• How the company came to be founded
• Stories from the early days
• Looking back on the first year
• The vision from here
• What makes the company appealing
• A message to the reader

You record the conversation online over Zoom, then write it up while listening back to the recording.

It takes a few hours, but once written it is an asset that gets read again and again, so we recommend not cutting corners.

Building the portfolio

The portfolio is a free-form section, used mainly to present the company’s track record.
You can use it much as you use stories.

Subjects we would suggest here are:

• The company’s track record (awards and anything you can put a number on)
• Press coverage (newspapers, TV, magazines and websites)
• An introduction to your owned media
• An introduction to your social accounts

and so on.

Designing the routes in

With all that done, you move on at last to the stage of getting more people to look.

There is a limit to the audience you reach inside Wantedly alone, so we recommend building as many routes into it from elsewhere as you can.

For example,

• Put a link on your social accounts
• Put a link on the recruitment page of your website
• Put a link in the posts you run on job platforms

and so on: put routes in on every web page you have.

As described below, Wantedly’s algorithm creates a virtuous circle: the more people view and share a post, the more it is viewed and shared.

Putting external routes into Wantedly therefore also lifts the views you get from inside it.

3. Running Wantedly, step ③: day-to-day running

So far we have covered the initial set-up, before any running.

From here we explain how to think about running it once that set-up is complete.

The measures to watch (KPIs)

In short, as follows.

Final goal (KGI): number of applications
Intermediate goals (KPIs): ① page views ② application rate ③ shares
Action goals (KDIs): ① writing and updating job posts ② writing stories

※PV (page view): the number of views

The figure above breaks the goals down.

Applications = page views on the job post × application rate

.

Say you want 100 applications. The going application rate on Wantedly is 1-2%, so assuming 1.5%:

100 applications = 666 page views on the job post × an application rate of 1.5%

.

Working from that equation, you test whether the shortfall against the goal of 100 applications is in page views or in the rate at which views become applications.

Points for increasing applications

While managing the numbers that way, there are three points for improving each of them.

① Update the job posts
② Spread the job posts on social media
③ Take down job posts that failed and write new ones

① Update the job posts

Update the job posts you already have, even if only a little.

Doing so makes the post easier to get views on.

Specifically, Updating posts three times a day, in the morning, at midday and in the evening, is what we recommend.

As of 2021.12.20, when this article was written, updating in the morning, at midday and in the evening lifts page views more than not doing so.

② Spread the job posts on social media

Ask your own staff to share the posts on their social accounts (Twitter or Facebook).

That gives you

• views coming via Twitter or Facebook
• and posts with more shares getting views more easily inside Wantedly

a double effect.

③ Take down job posts that failed and write new ones

As a rule of thumb, a post with 300 views or fewer and one application or fewer two weeks after going live should be taken down.

In its place, put up a post for the same role written from a different angle.

Repeating that cycle sharpens your sense of what sort of job post brings applications in.

There are various angles you could take in a job post, such as the following.

• How strongly the title pulls
• Photos
• Do you make the case on company culture?
• On the experience someone would gain?
• On the benefits?
• On your own distinctive schemes?
• On your track record?
• On your staff?
• On your leadership?

We recommend running it as a series of hypotheses, testing which of those elements land and which do not.

4. In closing

We hope that was useful. To recap:

• First, create the staff accounts, prepare the photographs and fill in the values and members
• Then write the job posts, the stories and the portfolio
• In parallel, put links to Wantedly on your own website, your social accounts and the recruitment platforms you use
• Start running it with page views, application rate and shares as your intermediate goals (KPIs)
• Watch the numbers while updating and writing job posts and writing new stories, and test which elements lead to applications.

We also offer a free review of your Wantedly account, so if you are interested, get in touch below.

Thank you for reading to the end.