Outsourcing
Embedded recruitment for Japan.
We put a recruiter inside your team in Japan. Part-time or full-time, depending on how much hiring there is. They run the process, manage the agencies, source direct, and report on it every week. The tool licences stay in your name.
- 10 to 50Workday Japan headcount
- 200Contact centre hires in a year
- 50%Of revenue from RPO, in last company
What it is
What recruitment outsourcing covers
Most RPO in Japan is a recruiter finding more applicants. The bigger problem is usually what happens to those applicants after they apply.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Feedback takes two weeks and the candidate takes another offer
- The offer goes out under what the market is paying
- Interviews have no structure, so nobody reaches a decision
- Agencies send volume and nobody manages them
- Nobody owns the role day to day
What the recruiter does
- Runs the intake and writes the brief
- Manages the agencies, their terms and their performance
- Sources direct on LinkedIn and through employee referrals
- Helps your hiring managers interview and decide
- Looks after candidates, closes them, and reports every week
This is Japan only. We are not a global provider running the same programme in every country.
Models
Three ways to run it
What separates them is how much of the hiring you hand over, and whether there is enough of it to keep a full-time recruiter busy.
01
Fractional
Part-time, one to two days a week
For when there is not enough hiring to justify a full-time recruiter, but the roles still need someone owning them. Most of the work is stakeholder engagement and running the agencies, along with employee referrals and direct sourcing on LinkedIn. Agency management is inside the fee.
- FitsOne to eight roles live at a time
- SourcingMostly agency, with direct and referrals alongside
- FeeFixed monthly, banded on live roles
02
Operational RPO
Full-time, sitting in your team
A full-time recruiter running the agencies, plus interview coordination, job boards, and programmes like new graduate or diversity hiring. Your team keeps the strategy and we take the day to day work off them. Agency management is inside the fee.
- FitsSteady volume and an agency panel already in place
- SourcingAgency managed, job boards and scouting
- FeeFixed monthly
03
End to end
Full-time, all of Japan recruitment
We run the lot. Direct sourcing is the default and agencies get used when we cannot find the person ourselves. The monthly fee covers the management. A placement fee on each hire is what makes finding someone direct worth the recruiter’s time.
- FitsYou want to bring hiring in-house and cut agency spend
- SourcingDirect first, agencies by exception
- FeeMonthly management fee plus placement fees
Most clients start at the top of this list and work down. A few months of fractional shows you what the real volume is, which is worth knowing before you commit to a full-time recruiter.
Tools
Who provides the tools
The sourcing licences go in your name, not ours. That is normal practice, and it means the candidate data is yours and stays with you when the programme ends or the recruiter changes.
You provide
In your name, billed to you, and we take no margin on any of it
- A LinkedIn Recruiter seat
- BizReach, Doda or whichever boards you use
- A seat in your ATS
- A company email address for the recruiter
We provide
Covered by the monthly fee
- The recruiter, and the management of the programme
- Referable and Client Brief Pages, run as part of the programme
- Intake, briefing and process design
- Choosing the agencies, agreeing terms and managing performance
- Weekly funnel reporting and a monthly review
- Coaching for candidates and for hiring managers
Third-party tools are not marked up or bundled into our fee. Referable and Client Brief Pages are our own and come with the programme. Everything in the left column is a line you already control and can cancel yourself.
Indicative pricing
What it costs
Fractional and Operational RPO are fixed monthly fees with agency management included, so there is nothing to pay per hire. End to end is a monthly management fee plus a placement fee on each hire, which is what keeps the recruiter working on direct sourcing. The prices below are indicative. The final fee depends on the project and on which recruiter we assign to it.
- One to three roles live, around seven hours a week
- from ¥350,000 / month
- Four to five roles live, around ten hours a week
- from ¥450,000 / month
- Six to eight roles live, around fifteen hours a week
- from ¥650,000 / month
- One full-time recruiter, running your agency panel
- from ¥800,000 / month
- One full-time recruiter, direct sourcing led
- from ¥1,200,000 / month
- Placement fee on each hire
- Agreed per programme
Fixed monthly fee. Agency management included, no placement fees.
Fixed monthly fee. Agency management included, no placement fees.
Monthly management fee, plus a placement fee on each hire.
The placement fee on end to end sits well under the 30 to 35 per cent an agency charges in Japan, because the monthly fee already covers the recruiter. It is there so that finding someone direct is worth more to the recruiter than passing the role to an agency. Tool licences are not included and are not marked up. We do not quote a number before we know your requisition count and what you are spending on agency fees in Japan now. If the volume does not justify a programme we will say so.
Our tech
What we do differently
We built our own. Most providers run your programme out of a spreadsheet and your ATS, and neither of those can tell you which of your agencies is any good. Clients get their own tenant on Referable, in their own branding, and the data in it belongs to them.
01
Client Brief Pages, in English and Japanese
Instead of a job description forwarded by email, your recruiter, Referable and every agency on the panel send the same page about the role, the team, the product and where you sit in the market. One message goes to market, and each unique view is tracked.
02
An agency portal, one login each
Every agency on the panel gets its own login and can only see its own activity. Submissions, funnel by stage, conversion rate, response time, and how that compares with the anonymised average across the panel. Terms and candidate ownership are recorded and dated from submission, so there is nothing left to argue about later.
03
Referable
Referable prompts your Japan team with specific people they can refer or recommend, the way an RPO recruiter drives referrals by hand, only faster and with less asked of your team. Referrals produce the best hires in most companies and hardly anyone works them properly.
04
Reporting
Where every submission came from, conversion by source and by agency, time to offer, and what candidates read and click on your Client Brief Pages. That is what tells you which agencies to keep and which part of your process is costing you people.
Referable
Referrals as a planned part of the programme.
Most referral programmes wait for employees to think of someone. Referable prompts your team with specific people they can refer or recommend, so referrals come in every week instead of after an all-staff email. It does what an RPO recruiter does by hand, only faster and less intrusive, and it brings in more candidates through recommendation.
Your organisation has its own Referable instance, in your branding. The data is siloed and secure in your account, and it belongs to you.
Our Terms of Service and AI & Data Use Policy apply to Referable.
- Specific names go to the right colleague, so people are recognised rather than recalled.
- Referrals become part of the weekly recruiting work, not a one-off campaign.
- The mapping refreshes as your team grows, so the prompts stay current.
Client Brief Pages
One message to market, and you can see who read it.
Most roles go to market as a job description and a link to the careers site. A Client Brief Page covers the company, the role and the opportunity in English and Japanese, and answers the questions candidates ask before a first interview.
Your recruiter uses it for direct sourcing, Referable sends it with every recommendation, and each agency gets its own version with its own profile and calendar. Everyone sends the same message, and each unique view is tracked.
- Candidates decide on the real story, not a forwarded JD.
- Common questions are answered before the interview, so first meetings go deeper.
- Tracked views show which channels and which agencies are getting read.
About twenty minutes, on a live tenant.
Referable runs as part of the programme, inside our licensed recruitment service. Your organisation has its own instance, and the candidate records in it belong to you.
Track record
Where the experience comes from
Murray built and led the RPO division at Experis Executive, the ManpowerGroup search business he founded and later exited. During that time, RPO was half of company revenue.
It started with one client. His old boss from VMware had moved to Workday and asked whether he could run their Japan go-to-market recruiting. As a company owner that was not possible, so he seconded one of his own recruiters into Workday to get the Japan business started. Workday went from ten people to fifty, every hire sourced direct, with no agency used at all. More accounts came after that, including some of the technology brands below.
Enterprise software, go to market
Ten people to fifty in Japan. Every hire sourced direct, with no agency used on the programme at any point.
Enterprise technology, all Japan
Part of a global RPO programme. Japan was kept on after the global programme ended, with direct sourcing going from four per cent of hires to forty-four. The RPO team was eventually hired into the client.
Consumer technology, support operation
Two hundred contact centre hires in twelve months, on schedule, without using a single agency.
Financial services, technical hiring
One of three RPO providers onsite. Replaced the other two within six months on performance, and the programme ran into a third year.
Delivery partner
While we have our own network of independent RPO recruiters, when Experis Executive has someone on the bench who fits the brief better than anyone we have free, we use them. It is a relationship built over a long time and it does not cost you anything extra. You contract with us, we stand behind the delivery, and the fee is the same.
Project work
Shorter pieces of work
These are not programmes and they are not the main thing we do. They come up often enough inside a programme that it is worth saying we can do them on their own.
Recruitment process review
A review of your talent acquisition process from end to end, from how a requisition gets approved through to onboarding, to find where you are losing time and candidates.
Interview training
A workshop for hiring managers on how to structure an interview, ask competency and behavioural questions, give feedback quickly and get to a decision.
Candidate assessment
Which assessment tools suit your roles, whether for technical skills, personality or leadership, how much weight to put on the results, and how to use them without letting them decide for you.
ATS review
Whether your global ATS works for a Japan team, what it is costing you in manual work, and what to do about it. The answer is usually training and process rather than a new system.
Employer branding
Content and channel planning aimed at people who are not actively looking, which in Japan is nearly everybody. Most of what candidates find useful comes from your own employees rather than the careers page.
Agency benchmarking
Performance data on the panel you have now, then a shortlist, terms and a scorecard for the panel you should have. This is often the first month of a programme, done on its own.
Each one is quoted on scope. If a review is all you need, that is a fine place to stop, and we will tell you so.
Next step
Talk to us about your Japan hiring.
An intake call takes about forty minutes. We will tell you which model fits, roughly what it should cost, and whether it is worth doing at all. If the volume is not there we will say so rather than sell you a programme around it.
What we will ask you
- How many roles are live at once, and over what period
- What you spend on agency fees in Japan today, and at what percentage
- How long a hire currently takes, from requisition open to offer accepted
- Who owns the agency relationships now, and whether the terms can be renegotiated
- Which sourcing tools you already hold, and on whose licence