25% More Traffic with Job Seeker FAQs: How OpenUp IT Engineer Built a Data-Driven Recruitment Strategy

OpenUp IT Engineer Inc.

IT Staffing & Recruitment·1,001+ employees·Customer Support; Marketing

The Challenge

OpenUp IT Engineer trains individuals with no prior IT experience and matches them with client companies as skilled IT engineers. But recruiting candidates for this pipeline had become expensive. The company relied heavily on external recruitment agencies to source applicants, and with Japan's IT talent shortage projected to reach 790,000 workers by 2030, per-hire costs through those agencies kept climbing.

The team built a dedicated recruitment site and started publishing content to attract candidates directly. But application rates for casual pre-screening interviews stayed stubbornly low. The root cause: limited direct contact with job seekers meant content was built on assumptions rather than real insight. Takahiro Ota, Section Manager of Media Produce, suspected candidates had unresolved questions or anxieties holding them back from applying, but the team had no way to see what those concerns actually were.

Why Helpfeel

Mr. Ota learned about Helpfeel through a former colleague. The feature that stood out immediately was the free-keyword search interface and the ability to collect the actual search terms job seekers entered. This was the mechanism to surface the raw voice of candidates: a direct window into what they were actually uncertain about, without needing to go through a recruitment agency intermediary.

For a team with limited direct contact with job seekers, this data collection capability was uniquely valuable. It was as important a reason for adopting Helpfeel as the FAQ function itself.

What They Did

• Launched a two-person operation with dedicated Customer Success support. Regular Helpfeel analytics reports and operational recommendations made two-person FAQ management sustainable. The core operating loop: review analytics, add or edit FAQ articles based on findings, monitor impact on casual interview applications.

• Uncovered an unexpected SEO benefit. Approximately one year after launch, the FAQ pages began ranking in search engines, driving job seekers directly to the FAQ without any prior awareness of OpenUp IT Engineer. The FAQ became a top-of-funnel acquisition tool, not just a conversion tool for existing visitors.

• Built data-driven content around real anxieties. Search keyword data revealed "standby" (the gap period between project assignments) was being searched frequently. At OpenUp IT Engineer, employees on standby continue to receive a salary, but whether such protection exists varies between staffing companies, making it a major concern. The team created a dedicated FAQ article explaining the policy. It attracted strong organic traffic, confirming the hypothesis. Prior to Helpfeel, this concern would never have appeared in internally generated content ideas.

• Split FAQ articles based on Customer Success recommendations. When search data showed a spike in "hair color" queries, the CS team proposed splitting one article into two: one covering rules during the selection and training period (where freedom is permitted) and one covering rules when deployed to a client site (where client-appropriate presentation is required). The rationale: give candidates this information before they even come in for an interview, pre-resolving anxiety and improving participation rates.

Results

Overall recruitment site traffic increased approximately 25% compared to before Helpfeel introduction. Roughly 20% of all recruitment site visits now arrive via FAQ pages, representing a substantial share of the total audience coming through a channel that didn't exist before.

Because one-quarter of overall site traffic is attributable to the FAQ's SEO effect, the addressable candidate pool has effectively grown by approximately 25%. Given the cost of acquiring candidates through external agencies, Mr. Ota described this expansion as highly cost-efficient.

Casual interview application numbers have trended upward since Helpfeel's introduction, consistent with the original hypothesis that pre-resolving candidate anxieties reduces the barrier to applying.

The team now has a reliable mechanism for collecting and analyzing real, unsolicited candidate questions, enabling genuinely demand-driven content creation rather than assumption-based content creation. Mr. Ota noted that the gap between what he had assumed candidates cared about and what the data showed they actually cared about was significant. Helpfeel closed that gap.

Looking Ahead

OpenUp IT Engineer defines its business as "engineer career support," not simply staffing or contracting, but meaningfully supporting the career formation of IT engineers as a mission. Mr. Ota views Helpfeel's ability to listen to users and rapidly reflect their real needs in content as a strong fit with this mission. The team intends to extend Helpfeel's use beyond the recruitment site to support engineers throughout their careers in additional contexts.

As SEO and AIO (AI Optimization, the practice of optimizing content for AI-powered search and discovery) become increasingly important acquisition channels, the ability to continuously collect and analyze real user search behavior will grow in strategic value.