Cost per hire for experienced insurance agents halved through strategy and disciplined iteration | Hoken no Zenbu Inc.

■ Company profile
Hoken no Zenbu Inc.
Website: https://company.hoken-all.co.jp/
Industry: insurance (life and general insurance agency)
Employees: 558 (company) / 694 (group), as of October 2024
Services: recruitment marketing support

Hoken no Zenbu Inc. (founded September 2005, Toshima-ku, Tokyo) is a general insurance agency centred on selling life and general insurance as an agent, and also supports life planning and offers consultations on reviewing existing cover. With offices across Japan, it helps a wide range of customers, both individuals and companies, choose the right cover.

Through its various web magazines and free consultations with financial planners, it also focuses on sharing information about insurance and widening its points of contact with customers. It offers online as well as in-person consultations, building a hybrid advice service that combines digital and real-world channels.

Under the corporate philosophy of “opening up the future together with our colleagues”, each employee acts with specialist knowledge and a customer focus to deliver highly trusted consulting. The company will continue to propose insurance that keeps pace with changes in society, aiming for long-term customer satisfaction and corporate growth.

Service site: “ Hoken no Zenbu“
Information site on money and insurance: “ Okane to Hoken“
Full support for choosing your fire insurance: “ Kasai Hoken no Zenbu“

The problem: the limits of their existing hiring methods, and the need to rebuild

Hoken no Zenbu had been running a range of acquisition activity themselves.

But in hiring that spans both new graduates and experienced hires, across a wide range of roles and sectors, the lack of specialist know-how and resources for attracting candidates had become a significant problem.

They also recognised that the key to success was not simply relying on recruitment agencies and job advertising, but “identifying where the people they want to hire actually are, designing a persona and targeting accordingly”; yet they lacked the time and resources to do it.

Around 2022, when they had produced a recruitment landing page and run advertising themselves, the organisation and the stage of the business changed considerably. The profile of the people they were looking for was completely renewed as a result, and the hiring strategy of the time gradually stopped resonating with the target audience.

“We don’t want simply to ‘update’ the recruitment landing page and advertising; we want to ‘rebuild’ them from the ground up to match the company’s stage.” With this strong sense of the problem, and aiming for a fundamental improvement in hiring, the project with NowVillage Inc. began.

What we did: thorough, hands-on support from persona design through landing page production to PDCA

In this project we went to “the heart of hiring”, providing one-stop support from designing the hiring strategy through to delivering it.
Hoken no Zenbu, for their part, prioritised the speed needed to get results, with the leadership taking casual conversations and first interviews themselves, and committed fully from the initial preparation stage, including checking every detail.

NowVillage’s support broadly covered the following four areas.

① Designing the persona: “redefining who we want to reach”

First of all, we focused on sharpening the picture of the hiring target.
We interviewed 12 employees working at the front line, listening carefully to how they came to join, how they see their careers and what they value. Built around the real voices of actual employees,
“people who want to contribute to the organisation as a team, rather than working as individuals”
“people interested in the goals of the company, not only in their income”
“people who like insurance and find meaning in contributing to society”
were redefined as the target.
Together with Hoken no Zenbu we were able to put into words once more “what kind of people we want to join”, and the picture of the people they wanted became much sharper.

② Producing the recruitment landing page: “a design that connects the company’s thinking with how applicants picture the work”

Based on the new persona, we also produced a new recruitment landing page (LP).
The first view carries the company’s stance, “changing what the insurance industry takes for granted”, as its concept, while the body honestly conveys both the concrete realities on the ground and the realistic working conditions, aiming to remove applicants’ worries and minimise any gap after joining.
Visually, too, we created the “sense of trust” and “stylishness” suited to the industry.

Specifically, we paid attention to the following.

• Explaining the pay structure carefully, based on the company’s actual results
• Introducing how appointments are provided and the future career path
• Readability when viewed on a smartphone
• Thorough design of the path through to applying (CV)
• A story that creates empathy, built around “a landing page that makes applicants interested”

③ Running advertising on their behalf (Google Ads and Meta ads): “building a well-targeted candidate pool”

Once the landing page was live, we optimised acquisition through both Google Ads and Meta ads.
On Google Ads we ran search listings on job keywords aimed at “active job seekers highly motivated to move”, and on Meta ads we ran creative appealing to “the benefits of working at Hoken no Zenbu”, split across several messages, aimed at “passive candidates vaguely thinking about a move”.

④ Thorough PDCA and creative production: “sharpening the advertising”

Once delivery started, we ran PDCA every week.
NowVillage analyses which message contributes most to improving “cost per qualified application” and “number of hires / cost per hire”, and builds new message ideas around the data and the applicant information the client holds.
On this project we produced more than 20 banners and improved the delivery settings based on trends in CTR and CVR. A large volume of testing improved accuracy.
When there was a week with simply zero applications, we treated it as “failure data”, analysed the problems with the keywords, banners and landing page, and approached the work with a thorough commitment to applying the lessons next time.

Results: cost per hire cut by 50% and steady improvement in both “volume and quality”

Within a few months of the project starting, the hiring metrics improved substantially.
Beyond more applications, a system took shape that steadily attracts people who fit Hoken no Zenbu, and both the “volume and quality” of hiring showed an improving trend.

The results of this project are below.

Metric	Result
Total applications	450 in total (while advertising ran) *Around 70 applications a month, of which around 20 a month were qualified
Total hires	Around 20 (result while advertising ran)
Overall cost per hire	Around 700,000 yen (compared with the 1.2 million to just over 1.3 million yen per hire they had been paying recruitment agencies, this cut costs by around half)
Quality of hiring	Interview pass rate and retention improved (agreeing the persona definition in advance clearly improved the quality of applications)

A comment from Mr Miyauchi, President and CEO of Hoken no Zenbu Inc.

Mr Miyauchi, President and CEO, gave us the following comment on the results of our support.

“NowVillage felt less like an advertising partner and more like ‘ part of our hiring team‘.
In particular, because they communicated so carefully from the employee interview stage, we ourselves were able to put into words once more ‘what kind of people we want to join us’.

A great many recruitment firms and agencies start simply with ‘What is your hiring budget and how many people do you want to hire?’, and their next questions are usually about things written in the job posting, such as ‘How many days off are there?’ or ‘What does the job involve?’. NowVillage, by contrast, analysed things including ‘what the company is thinking, what its business outlook is, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and how all that looks from both the company’s side and the job seeker’s side’, and supported our recruitment marketing on that basis, which was very good.

We define the goal of hiring as ‘the person staying after joining, performing as we imagined, and feeling a few years later that they were glad to have joined’. We were very grateful for support that took a view including the overall design right through to that point.

They also treated failure data as data to use next time, and we really appreciated that attitude.
As a result, I feel that not only the number of hires but also the quality of applicants has clearly risen.
I hope we can continue working together over the medium to long term.”

The partner behind their hiring success: NowVillage Inc.

In this project, the leadership at Hoken no Zenbu committed fully to hiring, cooperated with the employee interviews that formed the foundation of the strategy, and agreed to the decision to spend time on the initial preparation. All of this contributed greatly.

To match Hoken no Zenbu’s level of commitment, NowVillage did not confine itself to landing page production and advertising support, but aimed to make “proposals based on a deep understanding of the insurance industry Hoken no Zenbu operates in and of the structure of its business itself”.

We believe it was our style, not simply “running campaigns on their behalf” but seeing the problems from the same viewpoint as the client as “part of the hiring team” and carrying out improvements alongside them, that ultimately earned us such high regard from Hoken no Zenbu.

“Our hiring isn’t going well”
“We’re looking for a hiring partner we can trust”

If that sounds like you, please get in touch with NowVillage Inc.

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