Cost per hire for experienced insurance agents halved through strategy and disciplined iteration | Hoken no Zenbu Inc.

About the client
Hoken no Zenbu Inc.
HP：https://company.hoken-all.co.jp/
Industry: insurance (life and general insurance agency)
Employees: 558 (company) / 694 (group), as of October 2024
What we did: recruitment marketing support

Hoken no Zenbu Inc. (founded September 2005, Toshima-ku, Tokyo) is a general insurance agency centred on life and general insurance, supporting life planning and reviews of existing cover. With offices across Japan, it helps both individuals and companies choose the right cover.

Through web magazines and free consultations with financial planners, it also focuses on sharing information about insurance and widening its points of contact. Both in-person and online consultations are available, combining digital and real-world advice.

Under the philosophy of opening up the future together with colleagues, each employee brings expertise and a focus on the customer to deliver consulting people can trust. The company aims to keep proposing cover that suits a changing society, for long-term customer satisfaction and growth.

Service site: Hoken no Zenbu」
Information site on money and insurance: Okane to Hoken」
Full support for choosing fire insurance: Kasai Hoken no Zenbu」

The problem: the limits of their existing hiring methods, and the need to rebuild

Hoken no Zenbu had been running a range of acquisition activity themselves.

But across hiring that spans graduates and experienced hires and a wide range of roles and sectors, the lack of specialist know-how and resource for acquisition had become a significant problem.

They recognised that the key was not simply relying on agencies and job advertising, but identifying where the people they want actually are, designing a persona and targeting accordingly – yet they did not have the time for it.

When they produced a recruitment landing page and ran advertising themselves around 2022, the organisation and the stage of the business changed considerably. The kind of people they wanted changed with it, and the strategy of the time gradually stopped landing.

They wanted to rebuild the recruitment landing page and the advertising from the ground up to match the company’s stage, not simply update them. With that clear sense of the problem, and aiming at a real improvement in hiring, the project with NowVillage Inc. began.

What we did: thorough, hands-on support from persona design through landing page production to iteration

In this project we went to the heart of hiring, supporting everything from designing the strategy to delivering it.
Hoken no Zenbu also committed fully from the preparation stage onwards, with the leadership taking casual conversations and first interviews themselves, prioritising the speed needed to get results.

What NowVillage supported was broadly the following four things.

1. Designing the persona: redefining who we are speaking to

We began by sharpening the picture of who they wanted to hire.
We interviewed 12 employees working at the front line, listening carefully to how they joined, how they see their careers and what they value. Based on those real voices, we redefined the target as
people who think about contributing to a team rather than working individually
people interested in the company’s goals, not only in their income
people who like insurance and find meaning in contributing to society
.
Together with Hoken no Zenbu we were able to put into words who they want to join, and the picture became much sharper.

2. The recruitment landing page: connecting the company’s thinking with how applicants picture the work

Based on the new persona, we also produced a new recruitment landing page.
The first view carries the company’s stance of changing what the insurance industry takes for granted, while the body is honest about the realities of the work and the actual conditions, to remove applicants’ worries and minimise any gap after joining.
Visually we aimed at the credibility the industry calls for, with a stylish feel.

Specifically, we paid attention to the following.

Explaining the pay structure carefully, based on real figures
Describing how appointments are provided, and the career path
Readability on a phone
Designing the path to applying in detail
A story that creates recognition, built around a page applicants will engage with

3. Advertising management (Google and Meta): building a precise pipeline

Once the page was live, we optimised acquisition through both Google Ads and Meta.
On Google we ran search advertising on job keywords for people actively looking to move, and on Meta we ran creative across several messages aimed at people only vaguely considering a move, on what it is like to work at Hoken no Zenbu.

4. Thorough iteration and creative production: sharpening the advertising

Once live, we iterated weekly.
We analyse which message contributes most to improving cost per qualified application and cost per hire, and build new messages from the data and from the applicant information the client holds.
On this project we produced more than 20 banners and improved delivery based on how click-through and conversion rates moved. A large volume of testing sharpened the work.
When a week produced no applications at all, we treated that as data about what failed, analysed the problems in the keywords, banners and page, and used it next time.

Results: cost per hire halved, with steady improvement in both volume and quality

Within a few months of starting, the hiring metrics improved substantially.
Beyond more applications, a system was in place that steadily brings in people who fit Hoken no Zenbu, and both the volume and the quality of hiring improved.

The results are below.

Metric	Results
Total applications	450 in total (while advertising ran) Around 70 applications a month, of which around 20 qualified
Total hires	Around 20 (while advertising ran)
Cost per hire	Around 700,000 yen (against the 1.2 to 1.3 million yen they had been paying agencies, a saving of around half)
Quality of hiring	Interview pass rate and retention improved (agreeing the persona in advance clearly improved the quality of applications)

A comment from Mr Miyauchi, President and CEO of Hoken no Zenbu Inc.

Mr Miyauchi, President and CEO, said the following about the results.

“NowVillage felt less like an advertising partner and more like part of our hiring team.
Because they communicated so carefully from the employee interview stage, we were able to put into words ourselves who we want to join us.

A great many recruitment firms and agencies start with how much is your hiring budget and how many people do you want to hire, and then move on to questions about days off and job content, things already written in the job posting. NowVillage, by contrast, analysed what the company is thinking, where the business is heading, what our strengths and weaknesses are, and how that looks from both the company’s side and the candidate’s side, and supported our recruitment marketing on that basis

, which was excellent.

We define the goal of hiring as the person staying, performing as we imagined, and feeling a few years later that joining was the right choice. Having support that took in the whole design through to that point was genuinely valuable.
They treated data from what did not work as data to use next time, and that attitude was very welcome. As a result, not only the number of hires but the quality of applicants has clearly risen
.

I hope we can keep working together over the long term.”

The partner behind the hiring results: NowVillage Inc.

On this project, the leadership at Hoken no Zenbu committed fully to hiring, helped with the employee interviews that formed the basis of the strategy, and agreed to spend time on preparation at the start. All of that contributed greatly.

To match that commitment, NowVillage went beyond landing page production and advertising, aiming to propose from a deep understanding of the insurance industry and the structure of their business.

Not simply running campaigns, but seeing the problem from the client’s own point of view as part of the hiring team and working through improvements alongside them: that is what led to the appreciation from Hoken no Zenbu.
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