HERP

Having worked as a recruiter for two major companies in Japan, Ichiro Shoda saw from close quarters how human resources (HR) management was flooded with repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Despite changes in working methods, even today, the Japanese recruiting system relies on the traditional form of HR management and has not been making advancements. Owing to this, Shoda realized the significance of automating the clerical work for recruiters so that they can focus more on strategic recruiting activities. To that end, Shoda decided to use aggregation technology as a productivity catalyst for all HR and administrative functions. Shoda’s aim was to improve the speed and quality of recruitment by developing a well-vetted recruitment management tool. With that zeal, Shoda spurred the genesis of HERP, Inc. in 2017. The company aims to improve recruitment solutions in a way that is more advantageous for companies, candidates, and recruiting media.

Its recruitment management platform, HERP Hire (formerly named as HERP ATS), automates the routine paperwork for recruiters to streamline workload and improve efficiency. HERP Hire plays the role of a “site controller” by partnering with numerous job hunting portals and employment agencies across Japan to collect candidate information and automatically aggregate the data from these agencies using data linkages. This helps HR managers to solve the problem of error-prone and time-consuming processes of manual candidate information entries.

A factor that makes HERP Hire a cut above the rest is its recruitment management platform’s ‘scrum recruiting’ concept, which comes from the idea of ‘scrum software development approach

“We want to consolidate all the data related to recruitment in a single pipeline so that it can be managed collectively,” says Shoda, the founder and CEO of HERP, Inc. Apart from managing candidate information, HERP Hire also provides CRM services to enable the visualization of candidates’ intellectual information, such as job-hopping motives.

A factor that makes HERP Hire a cut above the rest is its recruitment management platform’s ‘scrum recruiting’ concept, which comes from the idea of ‘scrum software development approach.’ This allows companies to work as a team and establish the most effective way to attract and hire ideal candidates. To make this possible, HERP Hire ensures seamless and well-organized information sharing. HERP Hire supports communication tools—Slack and Chatwork—to facilitate efficient knowledge exchange within the company. These features not only make the platform intuitive but also user-friendly.

In one instance, HERP Hire helped a leading IT company reduce its recruitment workload by 30 percent.

HERP’s recruitment management platform was able to unify all the candidate information that were previously distributed in spreadsheets and shared through Google Drive and mails. HERP Hire also aided the company HR team to have seamless communication with the recruitment agencies, eliminating the need to converse through emails each time.

With such uniqueness of the HERP Hire talent management solution, the future of the company looks promising.
Recently, the company also added another feather to its cap by releasing a new platform—HERP Nurture—to optimize communication with talent and conduct hiring through personal connections. According to Shoda, HERP Nurture can be quite beneficial for mid-career recruitment needs.

"HERP Hire plays the role of a “site controller” by partnering with numerous job hunting portals and employment agencies across Japan to collect candidate information and automatically aggregate the data from these agencies using data linkages"

Talking about business expansion, Shoda reveals that the company is extensively focusing on SMBs, but in the future, it aspires to create services that will benefit big corporations. “Our ideology is not just limited to recruitment; we also want to change the decision-making style of the Japanese companies and help them adapt to the rapid changes in the HR market. We believe that this will allow Japanese companies to continuously have competitive advantages,” concludes Shoda.