What Separates Companies That Win at Hiring from Those That Don't Is "Whether They Can See Recruiting as a Structure": An Interview with Kensuke Sekikawa of uloqo

Sekikawa turns 36 this year. They have run uloqo for 10 years; after selling 100% of the company's shares in 2022, they bought it back through a management buyout two years ago. They introduced themselves as having spent most of their working life at this company.

uloqo operates a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) service and specializes in particular in supporting the hiring of high-end talent in the IT and digital fields. According to Sekikawa, rather than an RPO that resembles task-outsourcing BPO, the company focuses on delivering results through an approach that involves strategy development and changing the very structure of hiring.

Iijima, who is themselves strengthening hiring at their own company, opened by saying they have a clear sense that there are far fewer people available than when they oversaw hiring at their previous job. Sekikawa organized the background into three points: "there are no people," "competition is increasing," and "the methods are getting harder."

On the first point, Sekikawa said that in the mid-career hiring market, the total number of job changers is basically on a downward trend. The second is that, within that market, companies from various industries are fighting over specific targets. Third, because companies are so eager to hire, services such as applicant tracking systems keep appearing one after another, and the methods have become more complex, including how to handle those services. Sekikawa's view is that many companies are unable to adapt well to this.

According to Sekikawa, it has been about eight years since uloqo launched its RPO service, making it one of the established players in the industry. Compared with back then, the number of inbound inquiries has increased overwhelmingly. Some consultations are about a lack of manpower, but more often companies are struggling with being unable to build a candidate pool or simply being unable to hire people. Asked how much inquiries have increased, Sekikawa gave their gut sense: "four or five times, maybe even around ten times."

The companies that are struggling come in all sizes. Each size has its own patterns of problems, and inquiries from large Japanese companies have also increased considerably. According to Sekikawa, 70–80% of the companies that inquire or that they support have someone in charge of hiring. In many cases, they receive consultations from companies that already have HR staff and provide support on a project basis.

With more tools available and AI-based support spreading, why can't companies hire the people they want? Sekikawa acknowledged that handling the tools has become harder, but said the root cause is that the talent companies seek has become more advanced. Even amid the shortage of people, the targets companies are pursuing have shifted within just a few years. Prefacing it by saying "it's a bit of a buzzword," Sekikawa gave the example that right now, competition for AI talent is extremely intense.

The pool of AI talent is small and the competition is fierce. Companies therefore need to articulate their own advantages, positioning strategy, and what makes them attractive precisely, to the point where they can actually pitch it. According to Sekikawa, however, seeking this kind of talent is a change that has happened only in the past two to three years, and HR staff don't know what to communicate or what other companies are doing. Not knowing what the right answer is, they said, is what makes hiring difficult.

When Iijima asked whether people at the staff level are unable to define what AI talent is, Sekikawa answered, "No, they can't." It is difficult to picture, with high resolution and in connection with the business, why that particular talent is needed and how they will perform after joining. This is all the more true for people who have been hiring in a completely different area, such as sales roles. Specifically, they don't know how to search on scouting platforms or how to choose which targets to send messages to. Iijima summed it up by suggesting that, with so many platforms and support companies, everyone is running their own PDCA cycle from scratch to figure out what kind of response they will get by doing what, and where.

Using direct scouting as an example, Sekikawa explained that it gets harder every year because the number of companies using it keeps growing. In that environment, it is difficult for a single company to find a winning strategy on its own. To begin with, they don't even know how many replies other companies are getting.

As a result, it simply takes a lot of effort, and they don't know whether what they're doing is right. They aren't getting results, but because they've paid the initial costs, they have to produce results. Sekikawa pointed out that many people are sending scouting messages in exactly that situation.

Iijima suggested that the larger the company, the harder it is to get approvals, the fewer points of comparison there are, and the harder it is to build the kind of lateral connections startups have. Sekikawa agreed, saying that at a startup you can ask the person from the front line sitting next to you, "What do you think of this candidate?", whereas at a large company the effort and lead time involved, such as preparing documents and checking by email, are completely different. The difficulty of moving nimbly also adds to the challenge, they said.

On the difference between companies that can hire and those that can't, Sekikawa first noted that some companies start out with an advantage and some don't. High name recognition and salary levels are now an extremely large advantage.

According to Sekikawa, five or six years ago there was a startup boom and a SaaS boom; startups seemed vaguely cool, so if they played it right they didn't have much trouble attracting candidates. Those days are over, and startups are now struggling considerably. Large companies, on the other hand, have an advantage just by being large.

In terms of fundamental capability, Sekikawa defined the key point as whether a company views its recruiting activities structurally and approaches its problems accordingly.

According to Sekikawa, recruiting work is routine and labor-intensive. You process large numbers of applications, attend to candidates, gather interviewers' impressions, and contact agencies. While handling this volume of work, it is difficult in itself to break out of routinized tasks. When you can't hire people, you need to build in perspectives and process steps that don't fit into the everyday workflow, and spend time identifying the problem and figuring out how to solve it. But there is no time for that, and people don't know how to do it. The result is a cycle of repeating existing channels: sending scouting messages, asking agencies, and processing candidates again. Sekikawa's view is that in today's environment, hiring rarely goes well that way.

Can each company do this structuring on its own? Sekikawa said there are limits to obtaining objective data and methodologies solely from within a company's own activities, and that this is why demand for outsourcing to RPO providers is growing. However, they added, having the right perspective comes first, and it is also true that some companies do well without outsourcing to an RPO.

Asked whether the people leading such companies simply have a knack for it, Sekikawa answered that they "see things the right way." Prefacing it as a basic point, they cited reading data with a skeptical eye and not taking what third parties say at face value. It's a matter of basic standards, they said.

Iijima said that for executives, it also takes a discerning eye to decide whether to bring in such a person from outside or promote someone from within. Sekikawa explained the difficulty of this hire as follows. At uloqo, they tell clients that "recruiting is marketing and sales." What is required on the ground are qualities close to those of sales, such as commitment and a drive to hit numbers. But when you hire that kind of person, the work of unpacking upstream problems tends to be neglected, because it uses different abilities. People who have both are hard to find, and Sekikawa said this becomes a sticking point when executives consider whom to hire.

Iijima shared that an executive recently told them they had hired an HR head who had excelled at their previous company, but that person couldn't build a hiring strategy, which was what the executive had really wanted them to do. Sekikawa responded that executives say in unison that "our HR people are working really hard," and that from their own perspective, those people really are working hard.

According to Sekikawa, the problem is a difference in process stages. One is the stage of viewing things strategically and analyzing them. The other is the stage of providing an appropriate selection process to incoming candidates, closing them, managing the process, and coordinating with the front lines. The workload of the latter has ballooned, and it is an area that is difficult to streamline even with AI. As a result, Sekikawa suggested, quite a lot of companies face the problem that, despite working extremely hard, something fundamental needs to change.

With the talent shortage deepening and new tools appearing one after another and pitching their services, what expertise is required of HR leaders? Sekikawa, noting that it was a rough answer, named three.

The first is marketing thinking. What result do you get by delivering what message, to which target, and where? Looking at the results that come back, can you organize your thinking: perhaps this target actually had a different problem; if so, next time use this kind of pitch, through this channel, and here's why. Sekikawa's view is that it is already hard to deliver information precisely to targets these days, and without this way of thinking, the information may never reach them at all.

The second is knowledge of each hiring channel, including a feel for them gained from hands-on use. The third, a more portable element, is project management skill: getting the front lines involved and bringing stakeholders inside and outside the company on board.

Asked how to acquire these, Sekikawa answered using the company's own consultants as an example. uloqo's business is to develop such people and provide services through them, and watching its consultants, Sekikawa feels that there is a large difference depending on whether someone has the habit of questioning things and digging deeper into information.

Recruiting work is all routine and busy, with a lot to process. That makes it hard to develop the habit of pausing to think, "Why isn't this working?" Sekikawa said that as a result, valuable opportunities for input simply pass by. Even doing the same activities, some people grow significantly, including in their information literacy, and others don't. When it comes to specialized knowledge, they said, whether you have developed the habit of pausing, breaking down the problem, and taking in input is extremely important.

On the other hand, regarding how to develop project management skills and marketing thinking, Sekikawa answered candidly: "We don't know either. I think it's difficult." As a reason, they noted that many people who work in recruiting began their first careers in recruitment agency services or job-platform sales. Those jobs center on sales and do not place a relatively strong emphasis on marketing thinking or project management skills. Sekikawa therefore thinks it may be structurally difficult for recruiters and HR leaders to develop such skills over the course of their careers so far. They acknowledged that it is a topic with "no answer."

When Iijima confirmed that uloqo's service is essentially external support for exactly this hard-to-solve area, Sekikawa said it is. uloqo strategically hires people without backgrounds in HR or recruitment agencies. It deliberately hires people from other types of businesses, such as consulting firms, and uses them to make up for the "muscles" that people from HR backgrounds have not yet fully developed. The company ensures the quality of its service through how it builds its teams, they said.

The conversation concluded with the plan to ask about specific solutions in the second installment next time.