#16 Eliminate mismatches between people and organizations, aiming to put the right people in the right places throughout society

After graduating from Kyoto University Faculty of Law, I joined Morgan Stanley Japan Securities Co., Ltd. and worked in the Fixed Income Management Division for seven years. Six months after joining the company, I started working as a recruiting interviewer and interviewed many students every week as a recruiting leader. It was a lot of time and effort, but I found it very rewarding. This experience led me to become interested in the area of human resources, including recruitment, which can be said to be the catalyst that led me to my current business.

At that time, I felt that my work was nothing but a waste of time because there was almost no correlation between the scores I had evaluated as an interviewer and the success of the candidate after he/she was hired. I questioned the fact that people who cannot accurately evaluate people are conducting interviews, and I realized that even if I thought my evaluation was correct, a mismatch between the person and the company or the job was inevitable. I have come to realize that even though the world talks about the right person for the right job, in fact, mismatches are probably occurring. Looking back, I can say that solving such mismatches in society is the beginning of my current business.

Originally, I was interested in encounters between people and organizations, including during my club life as a student, and I think I have spent a lot of time counseling people's careers since I started working. I realized that this was the area I wanted to pursue, which is why I studied abroad for two years at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. I took classes focusing on leadership theory and organizational psychology, which included human resources, and earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA).

When I returned to Japan before graduating from business school, I visited about 10 venture capital firms. Using the results of a personality test I developed with an engineer friend of mine and my LinkedIn (a business-specific SNS) profile, I went around presenting my business idea for an application that would introduce people to whom they could consult about their careers and a matching service between people and organizations. I received a lot of pointers about the business model, so the next day I continued to prepare materials and pitch again, and when I continued to do so, I received an offer to 'invest in the company because it sounds like an interesting idea,' and that is when I seriously considered starting my own business.

However, when it comes to actually making the decision, I am only getting more anxious about cash flow and other issues. If it were just me, I could probably just eat pizza and do my best, but I was married when I worked at the securities company and had to maintain a life for my wife and children. When my wife and I went to a pub together and I told her about my idea of starting a business, she laughed and said in disgust, "If you want to do it, then do it. (Laughs.) I had been through so many major turning points in my life, retiring from a foreign securities firm, studying abroad, and then starting my own business, that it was only natural that I had been worrying about it. To be honest, I think I would have stayed away from the idea without my wife's approval and cooperation.

We launched the Mitsukari service in February 2016 with the release of an aptitude testing application. Our first monetization was focused on the job change market, and we launched a matching service to support recruitment through personality judgments. The idea was to market the service to companies we had previously met, have their employees take the aptitude test, and visualize their company's human resource characteristics and corporate culture in order to send job applicants to the company in the future. Since several companies actually started using the service and paying for it, we thought it would be better to sell it as an aptitude test first if we could make a profit, so we started selling the service as well.

However, the introduction of the system did not spread easily. The level of organization of what kind of issues to focus on solving was not sufficient, and the direction of the business had not been fully established. While the aptitude test was said to be able to reveal the personalities of people and organizations and match them with each other, it did not clearly indicate what issues it was intended to solve.

Even though it was New Year's Day 2017, we had a quick meeting and focused on identifying the issues we needed to focus on. We decided that there would be about three levels of appeal points: reducing turnover, increasing employee engagement with the organization, or increasing the productivity of the company or department, and we decided to target reducing turnover first. Of course, as the number of client companies increases, the issues will change accordingly, and I think it is important to keep sorting out where the value of the service lies.

As a result, the job change service was closed, and some of the employees hired for this service left the company, resulting in a downsizing of the system. We took this opportunity to change our company name to "Mitsukari," which is the same as the name of our service.

We also experienced the departure of the co-chairman of the company since its inception, which led to a review of the management structure. This was due to a difference in our views of what a startup should be, which can be described as a "common startup experience. Our services are valuable to companies, but they are more like "nice to have. Therefore, I realized that the world would only grow slowly. However, I believe that my co-chairman was looking for the speed of growth of a startup, which is partly due to my lack of ability. I learned the danger of deciding on the direction of a business simply based on the feeling that it will be profitable.

Mitsukari Services aims to understand and analyze the personality and compatibility of each individual, ultimately maximizing the power of the individual and the organization. The base of the Mitsukari Aptitude Test is the Mitsukari Aptitude Test, which visualizes the culture of a company or organization by answering 72 questions. The Basic Plan allows employees to register, take the test, and pay no fees, while the number of applicants who take the test during interviews and other occasions is charged according to the number of test takers. The plan allows you to match applicants with employees to determine who is similar to your current employees and which department they are best suited for. However, with this plan, you will not be able to see all of the results of the employee's test results, and you will not be able to compare employee to employee. If you want to use the full functionality, we will ask you to move to the Enterprise Plan (annual contract).

The purpose of using the service varies from company to company. Many companies use the service to match the personality of the applicant with that of the president, or to understand the compatibility of the applicant with the general manager to whom the applicant will be assigned, and to provide a basis for the company to consider an environment in which the applicant can work comfortably and play an active role. Some companies use the service to create a system for assigning current employees to departments where they are likely to play an active role.

The major difference from conventional aptitude tests is that the company's data exists as a result of the examination of current employees, making it easier to compare applicants with each other. However, rather than being used as a tool to cut short the hiring process, it can be used to eliminate mismatches in hiring and assignments, thereby reducing turnover, and to improve internal communication, which used to rely on intuition and experience.

Currently, in addition to providing the Mitsukari Aptitude Test tool, we also provide consulting services to understand the issues and intentions of each client company and assist them in how to use the tool. This makes it possible to enhance the value of the tools.

Currently, the number of companies using Mitsukari Aptitude Test is approximately 4,000, and the number of test takers exceeds 261,000. By industry, the IT and Web industries account for 25%, and the manufacturing and human resources industries account for more than 10% each.

I believe that everyone has something that they think they could be interested in for the rest of their lives if they dig deep enough. As was the case with myself, if you think you can make it into a job, you may be able to start a business. I believe that the prerequisite is to clarify what it is that you want to continue doing.