Tenshoku Navi (転職ナビ)

» see job.j-sen.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Most job boards charge a company to put an advertisement up and keep the money whether or not anybody gets hired. This one did the opposite. Posting was free, and Livesense only invoiced when a human being actually started work, at twenty percent of the annual salary and up. If the new hire quit inside thirty days the fee was halved. The company's own sales page put the three models side by side and described the conventional pay-to-post board in a single unkind phrase, which translates to money burned if nobody is hired.

Then it went further and paid the job seeker too. A congratulations bonus went to the candidate, not the employer, starting at twenty thousand yen in 2008 and reaching a hundred thousand by the end. You claimed it within thirty days of your start date, and it only paid out once you had held the job for a month and the employer had confirmed you were really there.

It opened in late May 2008 under the name Jobsense Shain. That became Jobsense Link somewhere in 2009, and the last rename, to Tenshoku Navi, landed on 30 June 2017. By then it had accumulated about 1.68 million registrations and some six thousand hiring companies. By December 2019 it was reporting 2.52 million members and ten thousand new sign-ups a month. Livesense itself had been started in February 2006 by Taichi Murakami, who was at the time a first-year undergraduate at Waseda, and who took the company public in 2011.

~ the chronicle ~

~ paid on success ~

The pay-on-success model works cleanly until the day you have to rank search results. By 2021 the employer page was offering three different plans, one of which was ordinary pay-to-post, and it stated outright that listings carrying a higher success fee were shown higher in the results. Three plans, one of them the very thing the sales page had spent years arguing against.

There is a regulatory story here that turns out to be the wrong story. Japan banned placement agencies from dangling cash bonuses at job seekers in April 2021, and it is tempting to file this closure under that. It does not fit. Tenshoku Navi was not a placement agency, the equivalent ban on job-advertising platforms did not take effect until April 2025, and the site was still advertising its bonus on 31 December 2021. When that rule finally landed it killed the bonus on Livesense's surviving part-time jobs site instead, at a stated cost of 350 million yen of annual revenue.

~ four listings a day ~

What actually happened is visible in the listing counts. On 23 November 2021 the homepage was showing 153 new jobs that day. Five weeks later, on 30 December, it was showing four. The board had resolved to exit the business on 25 November, two days after the first of those readings, and the employers left before the site did.

Livesense's filing is unusually direct about why. Hiring had been suppressed by COVID, and the site's core users were people changing jobs for the first time, a group the company expected to be slow to come back. The filing also says plainly that Livesense did not believe it could establish a clear competitive advantage in that market. Revenue tells the same story without the diplomacy, falling from 1,123 million yen in FY2019 to 653 million in FY2020, by which point the service was running an operating loss of 183 million yen on its own.

~ the going concern ~

The parent company was in genuine trouble. Livesense's FY2021 results carry the formal language for a company that may not survive the year, noting that sustained operating losses had raised material doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. Murakami cut his own monthly pay by thirty percent for four months in the same announcement that closed the business. Then the arithmetic turned around: the following year's operating profit bridge shows a line worth 330 million yen labeled simply as the loss reduction from the Tenshoku Navi withdrawal, and the company swung back into the black.

Livesense never issued a press release about any of it. The closure was disclosed through a stock exchange filing and a banner on the site that was dying, and the trade press appears not to have written it up at all. From 1 January 2022 only logged-in members could get in; on 31 January, a Monday, the service ended; everything stopped the following day and users were told to contact employers directly by phone or email, because there was no longer anywhere to forward them to. The employer console was shut by 30 June. The address answers with a 404 today and serves the farewell notice anyway, which is a slightly strange way to keep a promise but it is still up there, signed by Livesense, four years on.

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