From Founding
to Today

OneCareer Inc. was established in August 2015.

User growth was consistent, and the business was on a solid trajectory. Full-scale hiring began in 2017. But when headcount crossed 30 in 2019, the company faced an organizational crisis.

“We were all-in on the business and paid far too little attention to the organization,” reflects Co-founder and Vice President Arihiro Nagasawa. Vague hiring criteria and immature management practices gave rise to frustration on the ground. Employees who hadn’t received adequate support left in rapid succession.

Those who stayed were forced to confront a fundamental question: why are we here, and what does this work mean? The mission, core values, and internal systems that define OneCareer today were forged in the crucible of that painful experience.

With renewed momentum, OneCareer launched the “#ES公開中” (“ESs Now Public”) campaign in 2019. It became one of the company’s most iconic projects — and dramatically expanded the user base.

On March 1st — the official start of Japan’s job-hunting season — a black advertising truck appeared in Shibuya, its sides emblazoned with the campaign slogan. Outside a towering billboard near Shibuya Station, crowds gathered to receive printed copies of “ESs that cleared the selection process at 20 top companies.”

On the campaign’s landing page, more than 36,000 ESs were made publicly available simultaneously. The initiative was covered by numerous media outlets; ABEMA NEWS reported on it in depth on the day of launch.

The campaign’s intent was to bring transparency to job hunting — to ask, “Is spending hours writing the same application over and over truly necessary?” and “Shouldn’t students be focusing on what really matters: their careers, their work, their lives?”

The response was fierce and divided. It remains a defining example of ONE CAREER’s core value: End-User First, executed without compromise.

In contrast to the guerrilla spirit of “#ES公開中,” later that same year OneCareer partnered with Forbes Japan, one of the world’s most respected business publications, to launch a joint initiative: Great Company for Students — an award shining a light on companies that engage with students with genuine sincerity.

What set this award apart was that nominations came from students themselves. Students are stakeholders too. The underlying conviction: companies that truly develop people, and companies that recruit with integrity, deserve to be recognized.

From a pool of 6,000 companies, candidates were evaluated against criteria such as “Does engagement with this company deepen students’ understanding of the industry?” and “Does the company offer meaningful opportunities for growth?” — with student voices incorporated directly into the judging process.

This initiative later evolved into the 就活クチコミアワード (Job Search Review Awards), which recognizes companies that students genuinely felt grateful to have applied to and would enthusiastically recommend to peers.

As COVID-19 cast a shadow over industries worldwide, its impact on HR was swift and severe. In-person recruiting events were cancelled en masse. In 2020, with students navigating unprecedented uncertainty, OneCareer turned inward: What can we actually do right now?

The answer came quickly, and the company moved as one: “This is the moment for video.”

Within a month of that decision, OneCareer began live-streaming company information sessions on YouTube. The flagship event held that year — ONE CAREER SUPER LIVE, Japan’s largest online recruiting event — drew 20,000 student participants and featured 36 companies.

This rapid response wasn’t improvised from scratch. The foundation had been quietly laid years earlier.

Around 2017, the early start of job-hunting season and a candidate-driven market had already created an information divide. Companies were holding multiple information sessions, but for students in regional areas — or those with demanding schedules — access was becoming increasingly difficult.

In response, OneCareer launched ONE CAREER LIVE in 2017, streaming information sessions directly on social media. Two years later, ONE CAREER TV brought an on-demand, pre-recorded format to the platform. Leadership had long believed that “video is the future” — but at the time, the prevailing sentiment in HR was “you can’t convey the real thing without meeting in person.” Recruiters pushed back: “Students come to our sessions in person — no one will watch a video.” “We’ll just be showing our hand to competitors.” In hindsight, OneCareer was simply ahead of its time.

Around the same period, another long-held vision came to life.

OneCareer’s core asset is its vast proprietary dataset. From the very beginning, the company had contemplated offering a BI tool* that would allow companies to harness that data.
* Business Intelligence software that visualizes organizational data to support strategic decision-making.

That ambition broke into a sprint at a management offsite in 2019, where Director Yuiga Kitano proposed a sweeping “cloud vision” — a platform on which applications would continuously expand. This meant reimagining existing features of ONE CAREER, including job posting capabilities, as a unified cloud offering.

The broader leadership team had long shared the belief that “the reason HR lacks reliable information is the absence of a trustworthy platform.” They recognized that positioning the offering as a cloud platform would make that role unmistakably clear.

After approximately one year of development, ONE CAREER CLOUD launched in June 2020 — an enterprise solution for new graduate recruiting that gave companies real-time visibility into student behavior and competitive dynamics in an era of accelerating digitization. Adoption grew steadily, and the platform earned the HR Award Grand Prize from Japan’s HR Institute.

Having established itself on the consumer side, OneCareer had now opened a new chapter in the B2B space.

More than five years after its official launch, ONE CAREER — a platform built on unwavering commitment to students — had grown into a service used by one in two job-seeking students, with monthly active users reaching one million.

In an HR landscape prone to corporate-centric messaging and uniform presentation, ONE CAREER stood apart: its defining strength was a repository of credible, experience-based data — seniors’ honest accounts, real-world examples of successful ESs, and authentic insider perspectives.

At the time, 50% of Japan’s top 100 companies by market capitalization were clients, and the platform held career data spanning more than 10,000 organizations — a depth of coverage that comprehensively meets the information needs of job-seeking students.

After not placing in the “most-used job search platform” rankings in 2019, ONE CAREER broke into the top three the following year — and rose to #2 in 2021.

Even as business performance accelerated, OneCareer invested in its foundations. In June 2020 — at the height of the pandemic — the company relocated to an expansive new office, recognizing that an increasingly unpredictable environment demanded greater speed and agility.

The new home: a high-rise tower steps from Shibuya Station, commanding a sweeping floorplate. The decision to move in was made overnight following a single walkthrough.

By this point, the team had grown to more than 50 people. Previously siloed across separate spaces by department, teams were now unified under one roof — a deliberate design choice to foster connection and spontaneous collaboration. In anticipation of the shift toward digital recruiting, a dedicated video production studio was also built into the space.

The design concept was light — illuminating what was once opaque, and allowing people to shine. It was a living expression of OneCareer’s mission: to cast light on every possible career path.

A continued commitment to creative investment, “recruitment DX,” and the creation of new business lines — the new office made OneCareer’s direction and resolve visible to all.

As the organization evolved, so did its core values.

In the early startup days, leadership gathered at offsite retreats, filling whiteboards with sticky notes, wrestling their way toward values that still resonate today — among them End-User First and Integrity.

“There was a fair amount of aspiration baked in,” recalls Vice President Nagasawa. “We were describing who we wanted to become, not just who we already were.”

In May 2021, the company’s founding mission — “Visualize Everything” — was succeeded by a new one: “Creating as many careers as there are people.” The new articulation was proposed by outside director Shimpei Takagi and adopted by the full organization.

Five new core values were declared alongside the mission refresh. Drawn from the language employees naturally used day-to-day, the values were, in Nagasawa’s words, “a direct reflection of how we actually operate.”

Phrases like “let’s think about the fundamentals” and “what’s the essence here” were ubiquitous internally — giving rise to the value Essential and Long-Term Thinking. “Energy from being doubted” — another phrase that recurred throughout the company — became the value Pursuing Challenges Together. And as the organization increasingly attracted people with deep, specialized expertise, Discovering Individual Strengths was added to the canon.

Six years after founding, OneCareer entered the mid-career space. In June 2021, ONE CAREER PLUS launched.

The platform made real-world career transitions visible: “Who moved where, and why?” — enabling users to learn from others’ lived experiences as they charted their own next chapter. The ambition was expansive: to continue delivering career intelligence beyond the new graduate phase, and to collectively build a comprehensive “map of careers.”

“Once you land that first job, where can it take you?” — it was a question Miyashita had been asking since his own student days. At his first employer, a global firm, five different managers cycled through his role in just over a year.

That experience planted a conviction: “If information about career trajectories were open and accessible, people would be empowered to make far richer choices.” That belief grew sharper with the founding of OneCareer, and clearer still with the passage of time.

Job-changing was becoming normalized. Lifetime employment was losing its grip. ONE CAREER had grown to 300,000 registered users within a single graduating class. The moment to expand into the mid-career market had arrived.

Following the listing, a new executive officer structure was established.

The newly appointed officers came from backgrounds in engineering, management consulting, design, and corporate strategy and management — a deliberately cross-functional team. Their tenures at the time ranged from one-and-a-half to three years; one was only three years out of university.

The expansion of the executive team had long been under consideration, but it wasn’t without tension. Growing the business faster than the organization could develop its people — OneCareer had witnessed this failure at countless other companies, and was not immune to it.

The answer was found in exceptional appointment — promoting on the basis of individual strengths rather than tenure, accepting imperfection, and placing bets on potential. In a world demanding adaptive, high-speed growth, no other approach would suffice.

For a company that enshrines Discovering Individual Strengths as a core value, the new leadership structure was the living embodiment of the belief that “exceptional appointment is not an exception — it is an essential function of good management.”

“We will never stop investing in young people.” That commitment extends beyond internal development and recruiting — it reaches toward national-scale challenges: labor shortages, human capital strategy, and career education itself.