Wantedly’s mission

We created our professional social media platform, “Wantedly”, with the goal of helping people find a job that ignites their passion. Through our platform, we hope to create the opportunity for “encounters”, “connections” and “strengthened bonds” in order to create a sense of shared purpose amongst our users.

We define “jobs that ignite passion” as being roles where professionals can fully immerse themselves in their work, see results, and continuously feel their own growth. “Immersion” is important for motivation, and plays a role in the 3 factors necessary to generate intrinsic motivation; Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery.

With a platform that drives the above 3 elements, we want to achieve the greatest social impact in the shortest amount of time possible.

A profile that showcases individuals’ unique skills

With the increase of remote working styles and side businesses, the way we approach working is changing rapidly, and employment is becoming ever more fluid. In this shifting environment, professionals feel the need to have a clear online profile/portfolio where they can showcase their achievements and build their career as they do in the United States.

Professionals can use the Wantedly profile not just when seeking a career change, but also as their own portfolio that shows off their entire professional history in one page. The profile doesn’t just list work experience, it also allows users to convey their passion in work and ambitions for the future, creating a space where users can tell their professional story in a rich and visual way.

Wantedly is aiming to become the foundation for all working professionals by providing the space for them to showcase their unique story and skills, and creating the opportunity for these individuals to connect with each other and companies.

Issues faced by engineers that Wantedly profiles resolve

As is typified by our culture of OSS, presentations, and blogs, engineers communicating his or her achievements and way of thinking is not anything new. In this industry, everyone has benefited to some extent from the information our predecessors have made available to the public. That being said, while this information is out there, it is still not being utilized to its full potential across the industry.

We face the following two issues:

• The information available, such as blogs, videos, presentations, etc. is widely dispersed in different mediums and formats.
• It is difficult to understand the context of what one is reading, because the process that produced the information or results and the timeline that led up to it are unclear. Due to this, the content itself tends to be disconnected from the context.

The Wantedly profile addresses the above issues by delivering the following:

1. Provides a space for engineers to continuously compile and accumulate their own experiences and achievements.
2. The engineer’s diverse career paths and inspirations can be easily visualized.

We believe that by having engineers who are active at the frontline of the industry use Wantedly to share and store useful information, it will ultimately benefit the entire IT industry. Please give it a try if you are interested!

Wantedly’s values

With Wantedly, we strive to cut out unnecessary features in order to provide value through simplicity on one single platform.

When approaching how to create something, we place importance on our company values, “Code Wins Arguments” (rather than spending a long time debating, just create something and see how it goes) and “Focus on Users” (address and provide for user’s essential needs)

Business profile

Wantedly currently offers two mobile apps; “Wantedly Visit,” an app matching users and companies so users can easily hear what companies have to say, and “Wantedly People,” an app that allows users to store their new connections, and shares activities and achievements with them. We have also started a new venture in the field of employee engagement, with the creation of features such as “Story,” an online company internal newsletter service, “Pulse,” a team management service, and “Perk,” a service for employee perks and benefits.

Our aim is to create a world in which Wantedly becomes the “foundation for all working people” with consistent and thorough support from the initial encounter, all the way to a after the employee has joined the company.

Engineering organization

The product development team is divided up according to different development phases and there are no job specific teams. The current division is created in accordance with each focus; establishing growth, feature-specific product development, DX, and so on.

A hallmark of Wantedly is that assignments are determined flexibly in accordance with the engineer’s orientation. Team members are given the discretion to determine on their own what sort of tasks they would like to work on for the next three months, as opposed to an environment where designated tasks are handed down from above.

Product development is structured so that designers and engineers participate in product development from the planning stage on an equal footing and even have an understanding of implementation and post-release numerical values, which they use to make subsequent improvements. Our engineering organization is distinguished by having engineers involved across the entire growth cycle and continuously improving that cycle.

For that reason, the meaning of the concept, “the release is the start and improvements are everything” is imbued throughout our company.

Our Android Engineers

Wantedly strives to ensure that the core experience of our service is the same regardless of the platform. In addition, the in-house design system is maintained and the UI offered is uniform across all platforms. We have been striving so that detailed UI/UX will be optimal for each specific platform.

For example, we have made the following improvements for optimization on Android:

• Nativized Webview implementation for specific screens, improving PV by 40%
• Optimized app-side cache, reducing load when opening details from a list
• Provided quick action for notifications
• Shortened load time when opening cached content at notification arrival

We have been able to perfect a UI/UX that is optimal to Android by maintaining a core experience with a uniform UI and design system. These challenges and achievements are where Wantedly's Android engineers get to shine.

Bold and careful technology choices

When developing products that deliver value to users, one confronts a range of technical issues. An infrastructure needs to be created for validating measures and technical debt, however this can result in decreasing development efficiency, among other issues. Some of these issues can be resolved with innovative technologies.

At Wantedly, we always promote testing new technologies that could be used to provide solutions to common problems. On the other hand, other issues may arise due to the adoption of new technologies. Accordingly, we have adopted a strategy where we conduct an appropriate evaluation and optimization process after any new technology is introduced.

One example is the replacement of React Native with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) for mobile apps.

Although React Native had been partially adopted in line with our original goal of wanting to have our web engineers also be able to develop mobile apps, there was a lack of people actively maintaining the technology. We were faced with issues such as a decreased productivity due to the difficulty in updating Xcode and Android Studio, the UX varying on different screens, and low rendering performance. Because of these issues, engineers voiced their concern and hope that it would be replaced. At around the same time, we also had an issue where the business logic was slightly different between Android and iOS, causing bugs and leading to discrepancies in features.

We looked to KMM as a means for resolving these issues all at once. At the time, KMM was a new technology with few cases of where it had been adopted and used. However, we conducted a meticulous test, the results were accepted by the stakeholders and the decision was made to adopt KMM.

How we want to move forward

Wantedly is a product that began on the web, but currently, mobile app users account for more than half of our user base. Mobile has become a very important platform. However, there is still much room for mobile app optimization. We want to continue to evolve even further and grow our products surrounding mobile.

As long as there is a product to develop, there will be issues and new challenges that arise. As we keep growing our products, we will always confront any issues faced head on, employing new technologies and ideas to find a solution.

Would you like to solve future issues together with us?

We still do not have enough team members to realize our mission of “helping people discover jobs that ignite their passion.”

To further accelerate the product growth cycle, we will leverage KMM and other new technologies to improve the entire mobile flow and, at the same time, we must also confront the debt of our remaining old code base and other elements. To do that, we need to expand the size of our team.

We are looking for people capable of growing together with us as we continue to confront our current issues find creative solutions through engineering.

Anyone who has read this article and is interested in being a part of this, please feel free to come and hear more!

Wantedly Engineering Handbook

The Wantedly Engineering Handbook is a compilation of all of the information that our in-house engineers should know (that can be made public) Please be sure to take a look, and also at the description of our mobile architecture.

https://docs.wantedly.dev/

Career opportunities

Please check the following link for career opportunities with us.

https://www.wantedly.com/projects/734868

About the author

Masatoshi Kubode

I am the mobile engineer lead at Wantedly. Kotlin is brilliant!
My profile is here.
https://www.wantedly.com/id/kubode