Framing Hiring Challenges by "Structure" and Seeing Them Through to Execution: uloqo's Sekikawa on Strategic RPO

Iijima opened by asking whether, given how difficult hiring has become, executives need to take on at least some of the hiring themselves and think it through together with HR.

Sekikawa agreed, using the digital field, where his company is especially strong, as an example. Every company is pushing DX forward rapidly from the top down. When that happens, the next question that always comes up is "What do we do about talent?" So if leadership and hiring are connected, Sekikawa explained, it becomes easier to set a hiring direction and easier to secure commitment to results.

Iijima added that because DX isn't about digitizing one part of the business but about converting the entire company to digital, hiring the people to carry it out won't go well unless executives are closely involved. According to Sekikawa, companies that manage this are strong. There is a sharp divide, he said, between companies where the executive declares "Let's go" and the whole organization moves on hiring together, and companies where the front line says "We need this kind of person" but the request never gets prioritized.

Iijima then asked about the "strategic RPO" uloqo offers to such companies. Sekikawa said the idea he values most is "framing hiring challenges in terms of structure and solving them through structure." The service's stated theme is "true hiring support that goes beyond recruitment outsourcing."

As background, Sekikawa pointed to two sides of a recruiter's job. One is sales-like: work that demands commitment to numbers, such as winning over candidates who were hard to attract in the first place. The other involves taking a structural view of the market, including a marketing perspective, and solving problems in the face of increasingly complex hiring channels and targets. Sekikawa said it is quite tough for one person to manage both.

The value uloqo offers here, Sekikawa said, is the data it has gathered from supporting more than 500 companies to date. The company has data on everything: which channel, which target, what was done, and what results followed. Using this data, uloqo shows clients where their problems lie on a fact basis rather than through subjective opinion or guesswork, and lays out a path to solving them. Sekikawa described this as, in a sense, close to the approach of a consulting firm, adding that the company has no task-outsourcing mindset whatsoever.

As a concrete example, Sekikawa raised how companies work with recruitment agencies, which many businesses use. A typical company writes a job description, hands it over, explains what's good about the company, and waits for referrals. When a candidate who doesn't match the target is recommended, they say, "Why this person? That's not right," and try to build rapport and relationships through regular meetings. Iijima noted that everyone does it this way.

At uloqo, by contrast, using phrases like "push the agents" or "relationships" is banned internally. What the company does instead is capture, as data, the setup and structure of each individual recruitment agency. How many people are on the team? What acquisition channels do they use, and where do they source candidates? Roughly how many candidates do they interview? What internal criteria do they use when deciding which companies to introduce? uloqo goes after this information based on each agency's structure.

That way, when a client says, "We're not getting good candidates from this agency," uloqo can respond along these lines: This agency is structured internally like this to begin with. Here is the information you are currently providing, but this way of operating won't produce results. That's because the problem lies here, and this is the measure you should take. Sekikawa explained that offering insights like these while also handling execution is what differs from simply running channels on autopilot and building contacts and relationships.

Iijima summed this up as bringing science and data into an area that had been run on passion and experience, and consulting on that basis. Sekikawa added that the service consists of presenting the background and causes of a problem in a way that is convincing even from an objective standpoint, and then reliably solving it.

Iijima asked why something that sounds so reasonable hadn't been done before, and whether it was a unique type of service.

According to Sekikawa, there are many RPO firms, and their number is growing. But "they use different muscles." Many RPO firms provide their services by hiring people with recruiting backgrounds or by using freelancers. In Sekikawa's view, that setup makes it hard to develop a perspective that sees things structurally. Data only accumulates once you have a perspective; without one, you don't even think to keep something as data, and it slips by.

Since its founding, uloqo has hired not only people from the HR and recruitment industry but also people from consulting firms and similar backgrounds. It has framed each stage of the hiring process structurally and logged it as data. That accumulation is what lets uloqo do this, and its capabilities are different, Sekikawa explained. His view is that it would be difficult for other firms to offer a service built on this kind of design philosophy.

Sekikawa further noted that RPO originally grew out of BPO, and that most firms design their services in a way that amounts to selling time by the hour. Iijima recalled that RPO had an image of "We'll do our best" and "We're likable," and took the word "strategic" as reflecting that background.

On how an engagement begins, Sekikawa first explained that at uloqo, people at the executive level or above attend from the sales meeting stage onward. They grasp the client's concerns in that meeting and make a proposal based on them. As a result, uloqo already has a fairly good understanding of the client's hiring situation by the time the service starts.

On top of that, when uloqo goes in for the hearing, it brings a certain number of hypotheses. Iijima shared his own experience from when he was on the side commissioning HR firms: he often felt, "Do I really have to explain that, too?" or "I wish they'd tell me at least that much themselves." Questions like "Who are your competitors?" were typical. uloqo, by contrast, proactively presents its hypotheses: "Your competitors are these companies, right? We think your strengths are probably these. Given your business and current situation, we believe this position calls for someone with this level of skills." According to Sekikawa, doing this also changes how deep the information gathered in the hearing goes.

Based on the hearing, uloqo draws up the entire plan itself. At this stage, it feeds the client's data into an AI application it uses internally to lay out the problems objectively as well. From there, it decides on a strategy for what needs to be done and moves into the operational phase.

When Iijima pointed out that "a lot of effort goes in at the very start," Sekikawa replied that once operations begin, a huge amount of person-hours inevitably gets used, so how that time is designed becomes extremely important. The thinking is that there is no point spending a lot of time on the wrong things.

Iijima also said that typical hiring support tends to ask surface-level questions like "What kind of person do you want to hire?" or "Could you put that into words a bit more?", whereas his impression was that uloqo asks higher-level questions about management strategy and competitors.

On this point, Sekikawa said he believes that unless uloqo has a reasonably high understanding of the target at the point it takes on a project, it won't reach success in the first place. If you are trying to make a client's hiring succeed as a hiring professional, understanding the business and the role is "non-negotiable" and extremely important, he said.

Sekikawa said that starting a service without that understanding amounts to assuming you will only handle the superficial, technical operation of a recruiter's tasks. uloqo doesn't work that way; it sees hiring as inseparable from business activity. Sekikawa's view is that if you are trying to optimize a client's hiring, you must have a high-resolution understanding of the client's roles and business by the time the service begins.

When Iijima asked whether that meant the company must put a great deal of effort into the quality and training of its own staff, Sekikawa acknowledged that "that's the really hard part." uloqo hires with relatively generous compensation, he said. At the same time, with the spread of AI, the company is building systems and templates internally. So it is moving forward while putting systems in place so that people beyond those hired on generous terms can also perform well. Sekikawa described this effort as still being in a trial-and-error phase.

In the operational phase, measures are spelled out in considerable detail during the strategy design stage. The examples Sekikawa gave were fine-grained points such as: the job posting isn't presented well, and within the media it should really be running on, it ought to be seen in this way, so it should be changed like this. The basic flow is to translate all of this into measures and put them into action.

On top of that, uloqo assigns a person in a role called "director" to every project. A director is responsible for the budgets of multiple projects and holds clear responsibility for client satisfaction. To ensure quality using the company's internal knowledge and know-how, the director always takes part in the project and attends meetings. The actual work is led mainly by consultants at the member and leader levels, while the director fine-tunes things, strategy included, to drive results. That is the structure, Sekikawa said.

Iijima praised this system. The larger a company is and the more it struggles with hiring, the more likely it is that people don't know what other departments are doing or have no experience trying something new. His view was that involving a director who handles multiple companies would likely feed insights from other companies back into the client's own measures. Sekikawa confirmed this. uloqo's proposals and opinions are, as a rule, based mainly on results and insights from clients it has supported in the past, and the system is set up so that the director provides these to clients.

When Iijima asked whether directors would be heavily burdened if they weren't counted in the headcount, Sekikawa answered that uloqo sets its pricing relatively high among RPO providers and is designed to deliver corresponding added value. Directors, he explained, are there to uphold the company's service policy.

Sekikawa gave one more reason for having directors. As he constantly tells member-level staff, before you know it, you can become "someone who just does what they're told." What people should really do is propose, with intent and including priorities, what needs to be done to accomplish the mission promised to the client. But the client-side counterpart is often a manager or executive, which can be difficult for a young person in their twenties. So the system is set up so that the director ensures this, including appropriate communication.

Iijima asked whether uloqo also advises on measures such as how to use media and agents, or adding channels and tools that weren't originally planned. Sekikawa said this is done at the proposal stage. uloqo listens through what isn't going well and, right then, conveys its direction: "If we support you, here's what we'll do to solve your problems." It then puts this into a proposal document and hands it over. While the plan gets updated based on facts that come to light after the service starts, the basic direction is set at the proposal stage.

As a concrete example, Sekikawa explained that after hearing about a client's lineup of recruitment agencies and their track records, uloqo would make a proposal like this: "First sign with agents of this type and run things this way. In terms of numbers, we think this agent can produce about this many, and that agent can produce even more, so this should be the direction." Proposals are that specific, he said.

According to Sekikawa, it isn't unusual to find cases where you can estimate that something should be producing about this much, yet it isn't. Just by hearing a little about how things actually operate, he said, uloqo can see to some degree during the sales meeting what would happen if operations changed. When Iijima asked whether uloqo makes the same kind of proposal to companies hiring only a small number of people, Sekikawa said that regardless of contract size, it makes proposals the same way to every client that gives it the opportunity.

Toward the end, Iijima asked Sekikawa to sum up the biggest difference between typical RPO and strategic RPO. Sekikawa first answered that the biggest difference is unpacking problems through data and structure and presenting concrete measures to solve them.

However, Sekikawa went on to say that this is only the baseline, and what further drives results is "intent." Clarifying that he didn't mean willpower, he said he is confident in the value that can be delivered through data and structure. On the other hand, when you actually deliver the service, all sorts of things happen. Getting a department head's approval may be quite a struggle, or it may be hard to win cooperation from the front line. There are also cases where something clearly ought to be done, but the client strongly insists on something else.

In those situations, Sekikawa said, what matters is not responding with "Understood, we'll do it," but having intent and taking responsibility for results. Partly to put pressure on itself, uloqo doesn't make proposals that amount to selling time by the hour. It confirms the hiring goal, such as how many people by when, presents a scenario for achieving it, and then takes on the engagement by saying, "Please let us do this." As a result, it does whatever is necessary to achieve results. Sekikawa believes that neat strategy theory or structural theory alone won't move things on the ground, and he places great importance on committing, with intent, to that "grit" as well.

Asked what kinds of companies uloqo especially wants to support, Sekikawa said that any company struggling with hiring is a fit, and then touched on organizational culture. He had been saying that companies that succeed at hiring frame their problems structurally, but culture matters too, he said.

The problem Sekikawa raised was companies where the balance of power between the front line and recruiters is too lopsided. Prefacing it with "to put it bluntly," he said that at companies with an old-fashioned culture that still thinks "people will come to us, and our job is to screen them," where recruiters and the front line treat candidates with that attitude, the front line likely has a hard time. uloqo has supported such companies too and has delivered results, he said. Sekikawa's view is that, in addition to companies struggling because they can't hire people, he wants to support companies that are also struggling with the relationship with the front line.

Finally, Iijima shared his takeaways from both halves of the conversation. Executives must not leave hiring entirely to HR, and HR, too, will struggle to get results unless it stops trying to solve everything on its own and draws on professionals where it should. Beyond having data, insights, and know-how, he said, what left the strongest impression was the "grit" Sekikawa described. Rather than support that offers advice but doesn't execute, he found the service appealing because it seems willing to work alongside the client all the way. The series will continue to explore hiring challenges from the perspective of strategic RPO while hearing about specific cases, he said, bringing the conversation to a close.