CEO and Managing Director, Advisory Group
Advisory Group
Growing a recruitment agency with international perspective in Japan.
Today, we’re speaking to Jivago Matsuoka, CEO and Managing Director of the Advisory Group in Japan. The Advisory Group has been using Recruitment Boost for close to 3 years. Having migrated from another system, we wanted to find out how the team is using the system as part of their growth plans.
ABOUT ADVISORY GROUP
I founded The Advisory Group in 2015 together with my business partner. Four years on, we’re still both involved in the company and our team has grown to 15 people.
Japanese business culture is quite specific. Realising this is a challenge for foreign talent and companies alike, we focus on bridging the gap by sourcing bilingual candidates that know how to do business in this unique market.
This is also reflected in our team. It’s very international. It gives us an edge in working with our clients, since we understand both ends of the spectrum.
Currently, we’re focusing on permanent hires. In future, we’re aiming to include contract staff as part of our offering with a vast database of highly skilled staff. With the growing gig economy, this will be the future of recruitment. With Recruitment Boost’s Temp Solution coming out this year, we’re excited to explore this avenue.
WHAT MADE YOU CHANGE TO RECRUITMENT BOOST?
Our main challenge with the previous system was the slow customer service. Everything would take a very long time and any sort of tailoring of the system was chargeable. They were too big to really respond to our needs at the time and it was too difficult to get what we needed out of the system.
Recruitment Boost was recommended to us when we were searching for an alternative. I admit, I was skeptical at first – especially given the price, which is about half of what we were paying.
However, after the initial trial period, we were impressed by their customer focus. Customer questions are answered quickly and things get done! They’re really on top of it. You genuinely feel they want to deliver a great customer experience. It was a nice change!
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FEATURE?
Recruitment Boost’s search capability for one! It’s robust and runs quite fast. Also, the CV parsing tool minimises data entry for us. You just upload the candidate’s resume and in seconds all the data is extracted and uploaded into our database. Consultants only need to do minor additions or changes. This saves a lot of time!
It’s also incredibly user-friendly and easy to navigate. Thanks to its intuitive layout, more of our staff use it and onboarding new staff is quicker. They can get up to speed quite fast with our processes and all the information available on clients, candidates and jobs. Overall, it helps us be more effective and efficient and to deliver a more professional service.
HOW ABOUT MIGRATING TO RECRUITMENT BOOST?
CHANGING SYSTEMS CAN BE QUITE PAINFUL.
The migration was quite smooth. The customer support team was very careful in capturing our needs in detail to ensure all the relevant data gets transferred and we don’t lose anything important.
In terms of getting the team up to speed, since it’s so intuitive and easy to use, adapting to a new system was not as difficult. Overall, we find our consultants use it a lot for their day-to-day processes and managing all their activities.
Overall, it helps us maintain a consistent and professional level of customer service for our clients and candidates, whilst saving us time and money. It’s a good fit for us.