Using LINE in Recruitment: Nurturing Candidates Towards Interviews and Placements [2026]

To everyone running a recruitment agency.
Are you nurturing your candidates?

Candidate nurturing with LINE can have real impact — in one case the reply rate went from 20% to 80%.

With competition for candidates intensifying, nurturing is now so important that calling it essential is hardly an overstatement.

This article explains nurturing in a recruitment business, for readers who recognise the following.
・Too few registrations turn into interviews
・Too many interviews are cancelled
・LINE and the candidate database do not line up

There is a video version as well, so do watch.

1. What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing means raising the interest and the intent of the leads you have won through marketing
In business it is usually shortened to “nurturing”.

You have probably experienced it: you sign up for a service and start receiving a regular newsletter.
The aim is to have you use that service more, or buy another one, and the newsletter is the nurturing method.

This article explains nurturing aimed at the leads a recruitment agency wins — that is, candidates — why it is needed and what it achieves.

2. Why recruitment agencies need nurturing

2.1 The environment around recruitment agencies

・Direct recruiting is on the rise
Direct recruiting means a company approaching candidates itself; scouting is the best-known form.
The market for direct recruiting services grows year by year, which tells you the practice is spreading.

Source: Yano Research Institute

Behind the attention paid to direct recruiting is the falling working population that comes with an ageing, shrinking society, and with it a rising ratio of openings to applicants.
The figure published in April 2024 for the 2023 financial year was 1.29 openings per applicant — the first fall in three years, but still above 1.0, so still a seller’s market.

Given that, when a company sets out to hire, direct recruiting draws attention as a way to hold hiring costs down while still securing strong people who fit the business.

・More agencies per candidate, and longer job searches
Candidates register with 2.1 recruitment agencies on average, and those who successfully change jobs register with 4.2..
As for how long a job search lasts, about half of candidates take three to six months..
So you need to keep in touch over a long period and carry that through to a placement.

Source: Ties

・More recruitment agencies
The chart below shows the number of recruitment agencies by year. Since the 2013 financial year the number of firms in the business has risen steadily, passing 28,000 in 2023..

Source: https://jinzai-tenshokuroot.jp/column/1615

From those three points you can see that competition for candidates has grown fiercer still, both among agencies and with the employers themselves.— that is what the figures show.

・Restrictions on scouting platforms
And to compound matters, restrictions are being placed on scouting platforms.

2.2 The problems in recruitment

Recruitment businesses spend on advertising and on staff, and run all manner of methods, to win candidates.
But In how they then handle the candidates that spending has won, conditions and problems such as the following are common, and the spend turns into sunk cost.

• Too few registrations turn into interviews
• Candidates you cannot reach are left alone
• Emails go unread
• Too many interviews are cancelled
• LINE and the candidate database do not line up, so nothing is actually managed
• The workload has not been reduced or made more efficient

Until recently these problems stayed hidden, because you could simply keep winning new candidates.
Now, with the fierce competition described above, carrying on as before leaves it unclear how long a business can survive..

2.3 The figures that matter in recruitment

Three figures matter in recruitment marketing: cost per interview, cost per placement, and advertising as a share of revenue.
Judge each channel for winning candidates — search advertising, Meta advertising and the rest — on cost per interview and cost per placement, and control the whole through the advertising share.
As explained later, nurturing with LINE lowers the cost per interview, which in the end brings the advertising share down too.

3. How to get through an era where candidates are hard to reach

3.1 Don’t lose the candidates you have won

To get through the environment described above, and to carry every candidate you have won through to the figures that matter without losing any, you need nurturing.

3.2 Nurturing needs LINE

And for nurturing candidates, LINE is essential.
Some readers will say they already send a newsletter, but on usage and open rates, nurturing through LINE is the better choice.

LINE has 95 million users in Japan, and 86% of them use it at least once a day — a very high rate.
(Source: https://campus.line.biz/line-official-account/courses/oa-user/lessons/oada-1-2-2）

And where a newsletter typically sees open rates of 20–30% and click rates of 5–10%,
LINE sees 60% opened and 25% clicked.
LINE gets your message in front of people, and gets them interested.

	LINE	Newsletter
Open rate	60%～	20％～30%
Click rate	25%～	5～10%

Even where a newsletter is being sent, in many cases there is no measurement of who opened it or who clicked which link.
That can hardly be called nurturing.

So how should you use LINE to nurture candidates?
The sections below explain.

4. Types and features of LINE tools for recruitment

First, the tools you need to put LINE nurturing in place.
Nurturing candidates through LINE requires a LINE Official Account combined with a third-party tool.
So the running cost has to account for both the LINE Official Account and the LINE tool.

The cost of a LINE Official Account is as follows.

Source: https://www.lycbiz.com/jp/service/line-official-account/plan

From here, the types and features of LINE nurturing tools.

4.1 Types and price range

Four LINE nurturing tools are commonly used in the recruitment business.
・HubSpot
・L Step
・Mico Cloud
・KUZEN

Some tools do not publish their pricing so we will not state figures, but most are in the range of tens of thousands of yen a month.

4.2 What they can do

There are several kinds of LINE nurturing tool, as above.
However, there is almost no difference in the features you can actually use.
Generally the following are available, and they are enough to nurture candidates properly.

• Segmented sending
• Scenario (step) sending
• One-to-one chat
• Surveys
• Rich menus
• Booking management
• Source analysis

The features are broadly the same, but there is one thing only HubSpot does..

That is matching the information in LINE with the information in the CRM. That is the feature.

When the databases do not line up, you get situations where nobody knows which registered candidate a given LINE contact is.
For example, the LINE account name is “Taka” while the registration in PORTERS reads “Hiroki Takayama”.

Because you cannot tell who is who, day-to-day communication and reporting both cost time in looking people up.

The combination of HubSpot and LINE solves this.

5. LINE and HubSpot together work well for recruitment

5.1 The overall picture

The system arrangement for nurturing candidates with LINE and HubSpot connected splits into two cases.

① HubSpot is the CRM
② Something other than HubSpot is the CRM

① HubSpot is the CRM
Connecting a LINE Official Account to HubSpot lets you nurture candidates.
Connecting LINE and HubSpot is done through a HubSpot application: Little Help Connect is used.
Little Help Connect is what lets you match the information in LINE with the information in HubSpot.

② Something other than HubSpot is the CRM
Where a CRM is already in use, HubSpot acts as a connector. Linking HubSpot to the existing CRM by API closes the gaps in the data.
There are real examples of an existing system connected to both HubSpot and LINE.

Note: for connecting HubSpot to an existing system, please check with us or with your systems provider.
On connecting PORTERS and HubSpot,click here

5.2 What LINE and HubSpot together give you

Here again are the capabilities and characteristics of connecting LINE and HubSpot through Little Help Connect.

▽Features
・Manage LINE friends inside HubSpot
・Segmented sending
・A/B testing
・Automated message sending
・Reminder messages
・Chatbot building
・One-to-one chat
・Mobile app
・Identify where contacts came from
・Different rich menus for different people
・SMS integration

5.3 Other uses

Beyond the LINE connection, HubSpot can also be used to make the work of winning candidates and vacancies more efficient, and to make the data visible.
See the article below.

Related article: B2B marketing for recruitment agencies: 12 ways to win vacancies [2026]
Related article:“[B2B marketing for recruitment agencies] 12 ways to win vacancies”

6. What LINE nurturing looks like in practice

Here is the shape of candidate nurturing run through LINE and HubSpot.

6.1 Getting candidates to sign up on LINE

Since LINE is the channel, you first have to get candidates to add the account.
There are three main ways to do it.

① Make the conversion point on the ad landing page a LINE sign-up
② Put a LINE sign-up call to action on the landing page’s thank-you page
③ Invite the LINE sign-up by email

① looks sensible at first glance, but we do not recommend it.
Registering for something as consequential as a career move through LINE feels far too light, and the share of candidates who go on to an interview turns out very low.
At the first stage, having them fill in a proper form gives them the sense of having registered with a recruitment service.
So the recommendation is ② and ③, and doing both is best.
After the form is sent, ② the thank-you page invites them to the LINE Official Account. Some will still not sign up there, so ③ put a call to action in the confirmation email as well.

6.2 Following up candidates you cannot assess

Here is how to approach the candidates who, after registering, do not respond to calls or emails.
Even with ② and ③ above in place, a certain number of candidates will not sign up on LINE.
Set up a scenario so that follow-up messages go out at regular intervals.

And so that the follow-up does not become excessive,
give these candidates a rich menu offering a phone appointment rather than an interview booking.

6.3 Preventing interview cancellations

The thing to watch before the interview is cancellation.
Having had support pass you the ball, you do not want to drop it here.
To prevent cancellations, set up a scenario that sends the interview details by both email and LINE three days before and the day before.
Having the scenario in place also prevents human error, such as a support or career adviser forgetting to send the reminder.

6.4 Sending assessment content

Building assessment content is normally very expensive,
but with LINE and HubSpot the flexible scenario builder makes it easy.
Assessment content is good at holding a registered candidate’s interest.

6.5 Sending informational content

Many firms publish career know-how and information about the employers they recruit for, on their own site or jobs site.
That content builds up and works for search, but the volume also makes it more likely that the people you want to reach never see it.

So use LINE to put the right content in front of the right person.

Segmentation is the key to sending content.
Ideally you segment along lines such as the following and design the sending to match the person.
・By job function
・By age group, and experienced versus new to the field
・By stage of the job search
and so on

Sending the right information to people segmented this way should raise engagement too.

6.6 Arranging interview times

Sending a HubSpot scheduling link over LINE lets interview times be arranged automatically.
It is particularly useful for candidates who are active but whose interview was never scheduled, and for arranging second and third interviews.
We recommend putting a scheduling block in the rich menu for candidates at a stage where an interview needs arranging.

6.7 Different rich menus for different people

The rich menu can send people to your own site or jobs site, and beyond that,
you can show different menus depending on the person’s segment and interview stage.

For people who have only signed up on LINE and whose details you do not have, or whom you have not got through to, show a “book a call” menu; for those with an interview already arranged, show “check your time”.
And while a hiring event is running, you can show a “register for the event” menu.

Defining the stages and segments and running against them is what matters.

6.8 Handling enquiries

With LINE, enquiries from candidates come in more readily than by email, and are easier to answer.
Enquiries that matter to the business and to the support and adviser teams can be turned into tickets, so the information is shared and the service improved.

6.9 One-to-one communication

One-to-one exchanges between a candidate and a career adviser are possible too.
For those exchanges, the replying account name can be set to whatever you like.
The candidate sees their adviser’s icon and name, so they can talk with confidence.

7. The return on LINE and HubSpot

Here is the return on nurturing candidates with LINE and HubSpot.

First, the benefits.

• Reply rates from candidates improve
• Scenario sending makes the work more efficient
• Segmented sending delivers personalised content
• Candidate details in LINE match the records in the database
• Because everyone uses the LINE Official Account, you can set rules for communication and work on quality

And what you will want to know is the effect on the figures that matter: cost per interview and cost per placement.
Below is an illustration of the return from nurturing candidates with LINE and HubSpot.

Suppose that of 100 active candidates who did not make it to interview — cancellations and the like — LINE nurturing brings 15 to interview.
At a LINE cost of ¥100,000 a month, the cost per interview from nurturing comes to under ¥7,000.

Cost per interview in a recruitment business usually runs between ¥50,000 and ¥200,000,
so you can see that bringing candidates back through LINE nurturing pulls that cost down.

In the end, implementing LINE nurturing in HubSpot makes it possible to reduce advertising as a share of revenue.

8. A LINE and HubSpot case study

Here is an example of a company nurturing candidates with LINE and HubSpot.

■Randstad K.K.
Randstad connected LINE, HubSpot and its existing CRM, and raised the reply rate from candidates from 20% to 80%.

The details are here.
https://www.hubspot.jp/case-studies/randstad

9. Full support for nurturing in recruitment

We hope that was useful.
We have covered why nurturing candidates matters, how to implement it, and what it returns.

▽In summary
・Nurturing candidates through LINE is essential
・It lowers the cost per interview by not losing the candidates you have won
・A system that can match LINE details against the CRM is valuable
→「LINE × HubSpot」

LINE and HubSpot are indispensable to building something that does not let won candidates slip away.

There are other benefits too, such as making day-to-day communication more efficient, so we hope you will put it on the table.

We support the implementation of LINE and HubSpot.
From what scenarios to build to how to write the messages, we support every part of nurturing.