Co-Founder / Managing Director：Matt Nicholls

Nakano：Your company seems to have mostly foreign employees.”

Matt：Currently (July 2021) there are about 40 employees, but there are only two Japanese, and the rest are foreign nationals.

Nakano：It’s a truly global work environment. Please tell us about the features of your business.

Matt：Since the company was founded, it has grown from a small scale of four people to a scale of 40 people in about two years, and this speed of growth is our unique point. I think it is quite unique for a recruitment agency to be receiving investments from Morgan Stanley, a global financial institution. We also plan to move to an office with a 90 person capacity at the beginning of next year. In the coming three or four years, we aim to become a company with 250 employees and one of the largest recruitment agencies in Tokyo.

Nakano：Your growth speed is amazing! What are your strengths in particular?

Matt：It’s that we hire a lot of very experienced consultants who have good track records, and the fact that Alex, co-founder, and I have the experience of expanding a 15-people company to a 250- people company. These reputations are appealing to our clients and we have built a deep trust.

Nakano：You are using Daijob.com as a recruitment agency to acquire candidates. How do you recruit employees to work your company?

Matt：There are many job seekers who apply directly to our company. We were initially recruiting only experienced successful consultants, but now we have started recruiting new graduates as the company grows larger. We are also promoting collaboration with various universities. In the future, we would like to recruit 50-50 of experienced consultants and inexperienced employees.

Nakano：What do you do to retain consultants who are producing results?

Matt：We try to hire highly motivated people regardless of their experiences. The drive can be anything, salary, to take care of family, and so on. Over the past 15 months, we had zero staff turnover and this is very rare in the recruitment industry. I think that the company’s culture is very important, and having a clear and equal promotion targets for everyone helps to keep the high employee retention rate.

Nakano：Your scout reply rate was 44% last month, which was outstandingly high compared to other companies. What did your consultants do to achieve such a track record?

Matt：We have a good reputation and strong trust from candidates since our consultants have good understanding of the industry and are able to provide accurate advice based on their experience. In addition, we have established strong relationships with our clients, which allows us to set up interviews almost 100% of the time. I believe that the trust from both clients and candidates reflect in the high scout reply rate.

Nakano：That kind of solid relationship seems to accelerate your company’s growth. What are you valuing internally to increase your recruitment success?

Matt：In addition to our thorough staff training, we really make an effort to fully understand the details of the candidates and clients. We match them with a clear overview by looking into their needs and backgrounds. Therefore, we focus on sending individual personalized scout messages to attract candidates.

Stott：We also recommend focusing more on individual scouts not the bulk scouts, because the reply rate increases. Still, 44% reply rate out of 300 scouts is a remarkable result.

Matt：Maybe it’s because we also value team work. In other companies, if you were a candidate, you only deal with one recruiter. But in our case, the candidate is able to get in touch with all of our recruiters, which allows the candidates have more options.

Nakano：Please tell us why you decided to use Daijob.com.

Matt：I had used Daijob.com in the past and been successful using it in my previous companies, so it was an easy decision to use it for Cornerstone as well. We had received very good advice during the initial training and I feel it is the easiest platform to use compared to others.

Nakano：We are planning to further enhance the functions of Daijob.com in the future. The AI Recommendation function, which automatically displays job seekers who match job information, will launch soon.

Matt：That’s interesting and nice! However, the consultants might become lazy if they rely too much on the AI Recommendation function. We need to find a way to motivate them to continue finding candidates themselves.

Nakano：Yes, and in order to make it easier to pinpoint the matches, we have registered new positions, bringing the total to 34, making it more detailed.

Matt：That’s wonderful, too. Let’s continue to have meetings like today on a regular basis. We would love to get feedback on scouting response rate, updates on site features, and advice on recruitment activities.

Nakano & Stott：Yes, Let’s!