As the founder and the CEO of Visional, I am honored to have this opportunity to share our story with you.

Visional helps companies identify, acquire, and manage talent. And in doing so, we aspire to help define the future of work in Japan. We deliver a pioneering suite of industry leading HR Tech services, ranging from recruitment to human capital management, to a variety of clients throughout the Japanese market.

Our story began as I was preparing to leave my previous role at a professional baseball club, to embark on a new adventure to pursue my true calling. I came to notice two painful facets that seemed to characterize the stagnation of the Japanese economy over the past few decades: first, Japan had (and still has) one of the least productive workforces in the developed world, and second, an astonishingly illiquid labor market that was inhibiting the efficient realignment of workers and suppressing the free exchange of new ideas and fresh perspectives.

I saw in this painful reality an opportunity and a challenge worthy of dedicating my career to.

In 2009, we founded BizReach, a career networking platform and now the core business of Visional, to directly connect job seeking professionals with prospective employers.

In an unbalanced marketplace, where recruiting advantages were routinely skewed towards employers and transparency had been notoriously lacking, this was a disruptive innovation.

BizReach has developed into a burgeoning platform that democratizes the hiring process and empowers job seekers. By providing job seekers with autonomy, power, and a newly gained sense of control, the number of scoutable job seekers on BizReach increased to more than 2,140,000 individuals as of July 31, 2023. Our success in increasing the pool of job seekers has, in turn, made the platform attractive to direct employers and third-party recruiters seeking to benefit from it.

This positive cycle has allowed BizReach to evolve into a leading career networking platform and a widely recognized brand in the recruiting space in Japan.

Our journey, however, does not stop there. As a pioneer in the concept of “direct recruiting” in which the BizReach platform connects job seekers, direct employers and third-party recruiters, we came to also identify a significant growth opportunity in managing talent after being hired.

In 2016, we created a cloud-based human capital management (HCM) platform called HRMOS to leverage the collective skills and experience of the client network that we had steadily built through our BizReach platform. We were already providing a unique lateral hiring experience for job seekers direct employers and third-party recruiters. We now wanted to extend our impact beyond the signing of the offer letter.

To that end, we have positioned our HRMOS platform as the central part of our vision of a data-driven ecosystem. HRMOS provides a seamless flow of cloud-based HCM services ranging from recruitment, performance, training, deployment and engagement. As we continue to add more functions, we expect HRMOS to empower employers to construct and maintain a consistent management experience, by reimagining all aspects of the traditional employment lifecycle. Our aim is to consolidate and simplify talent acquisition, onboarding, performance optimization, engagement, people analytics and many critical HCM activities. Our vision for HRMOS is to intelligently automate the full spectrum of people management workflows, eliminating manual tasks, streamlining productivity, and unleashing the true potential of optimized HR teams.

The concept of HRMOS is to curate an unmatched employee experience by putting people first. We truly believe that people should be the largest and most important investment any company will ever make. Simply put, your workforce is your greatest asset. HRMOS embodies our commitment to this vision. Hiring and retaining engaged and productive employees will be the key to our enterprise clients’ success, and HRMOS is positioned to provide the necessary tools to realize this fundamental goal.

Our growth strategy is now centered on the seamless integration of BizReach and HRMOS. Our aim is to provide a unified, data-driven HCM ecosystem in which employee performance can be quantitatively optimized, and corporate processes can be constantly streamlined to reduce costs to maximize employee productivity. The collective power of these unique platforms will guide our clients to make smarter decisions, in alignment with our vision of the future of work. Above all, our goal is to make the workplace fun, exciting and fulfilling, for everyone involved.

In a fast-moving world where business strategies seem to change overnight, our founding mission remains the same: we never cease to pursue new possibilities. Building on the principles and approaches that enabled our prior successes, we plan to continue evaluating all potential areas of growth that will emerge from seismic shifts and technological innovation in Japan. As in the past, we expect to pursue any such growth opportunities only after a prudent assessment based on clear guidelines and multiple criteria, in order to maximize mid-to-long-term value for our stakeholders.

I’ve been very fortunate to have had the wonderful opportunity to continually grow as an entrepreneur, proudly building a portfolio of successful businesses together with our incredible Visional team. And yet, our adventure has just begun. We look forward to working with all of our partners, including yourself, to continue making an impact on the world in our own unique way.

We happily invite you to join us on our exciting journey.

Soichiro Minami
 Visional, Inc.
 Founder and CEO