Turnpoint Consulting Co., Ltd.

Turnpoint Consulting is a Tokyo-based specialized recruitment firm, founded in 2016, with a legal entity in Plano, Texas. We focus on mid-career to executive-level hiring across the automotive, mobility, semiconductor, and space and defense sectors. From the beginning, our strategy has been to go deep rather than broad, concentrating on industries that are either undergoing significant technological transformation, such as ADAS, electrification, and next-generation mobility, or experiencing rapid growth where demand for talent exceeds supply. 

We are a boutique firm of 18 people in total, with each team aligned to a specific industry vertical. This structure allows our consultants to act as true specialists, engaging with hiring managers and candidates not only from a recruitment perspective but with a real understanding of the technical and commercial context behind each role. We handle positions from mid-career through to the C-suite, with functional strengths spanning engineering, product, sales, purchasing, supply chain, and business development. 

Our primary market is Japan, working with both foreign and Japanese companies hiring locally. Our Texas entity allows us to support Japanese companies building out critical functions overseas, as well as foreign clients who ask us to help with hiring outside Japan, primarily in the US and Korean markets. 

Before PORTERS, we used an overseas CRM system. English-language support was important to us at the time, and that system was easy to set up and worked well for individual use in our early days. As the team grew to four, five, and then six consultants, however, it became increasingly difficult to work in unison as a group. We could not add notes flexibly where we needed them, job postings were not freely customizable, and reporting on our side was limited. It suited individual work, but not the collaborative phase we were entering. 

Around the time our operations lead joined and the company recognized the need to operate more as a unified team, we decided it was time to look at alternatives. The initial trigger was an approach from another vendor, which prompted us to evaluate several options, including PORTERS. 

Our representative director, Andre, had used PORTERS at a firm he worked at before founding Turnpoint, so there was already a degree of familiarity with the system. When we weighed cost against functionality, PORTERS sat in a clear sweet spot. It was more expensive than our previous system, but considerably more affordable than a large-scale enterprise CRM, while offering the functionality our industry actually requires. 

What stood out most was how deeply PORTERS understands the recruitment process. The platform is built specifically for our industry, with years of experience reflected in its design, which gave us real confidence. Even consultants who are new to recruitment can use it intuitively, almost as if the system guides them. Other large vendors pitched grand, expansive visions involving marketing automation and sweeping reporting systems, but for a firm of our size, that was more than we needed. PORTERS fit our requirements precisely, covering exactly what a recruitment business needs without unnecessary complexity. 

We use PORTERS for essentially every step of our process. Candidates, companies, job orders, and the entire selection pipeline are managed in one place, so any consultant can see the status of a given case and share progress across the team. We train our newer consultants to enter information directly into PORTERS during interviews, which keeps the data clean and avoids duplication. 

 Two features stand out in practice. Flexible email templates allow consultants to communicate with consistency while preserving a tailored, personal touch. Bulk actions streamline how we match opportunities and talent at scale. Together, they combine efficiency with the level of care and distinctiveness we aim to deliver in every interaction. 

Because PORTERS is highly customizable, we can categorize candidates at a very granular level around the niche skill sets that matter in our markets. This means we can quickly pull up the entire field for a highly specific role, including specialists that other recruiting firms, even large ones, may not have a single candidate for. From an industry standpoint, that depth of categorization is extremely powerful. 

The flexibility also helps us keep pace with change. As labor regulations and market conditions shift, the customizability of the platform makes it relatively easy to adjust and adapt our setup accordingly. 

The most striking change has been in our inbound channel. By posting open positions to job media and using CSV function for the import of applicant information, we built a cycle that dramatically strengthened inbound activity. Where inbound placements were once just a handful over a six-month period, inbound interviews have since grown roughly sixfold. 

Much of this comes down to back-office efficiency. Registering candidates from scout sites was previously a fully manual task, handled one by one by consultants. Today, around 90 percent of that work is automated through our back office. Annual candidate registrations have increased 3.9 times, while the daily time required has been compressed to about 30 minutes. On the job posting side, what was once a manual process of fewer than 100 listings at a time has become a half automated flow using CSV export and mapping, with around 1,500 listings now managed across sites. 

Over the same period, our revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 22.4 percent between 2022 and 2024, including 34.2 percent growth from 2023 to 2024. While revenue in recruitment is ultimately a function of consultants and productivity, the platform has been instrumental in letting our back office support and amplify the work of our consultants, freeing them to focus on the interviews and matching that create the most value. 

Data-driven training has been a significant and somewhat unexpected benefit. Because we can extract and analyze data cleanly from PORTERS, we are able to identify where individual consultants are weaker and design specific training to address those areas, then monitor the improvements over time. It has become a genuine driver of consultant development. 

Another benefit came from how we capture market opportunities. Previously, when a client had 30 open positions, a consultant with limited time might only enter a few they felt able to handle, and ignore the rest. Now that we import all of those positions into the system, a role we might otherwise have set aside can still result in a placement when an inbound candidate shows interest. Simply having that information in the platform has opened up opportunities we would not have pursued before. 

One of the most fundamental strengths is the quality of the data structure. We can extract our data cleanly and use it as we need to, which sounds basic but was simply not possible with our previous system. The way data is organized makes it genuinely usable, which is essential for a firm that wants to operate in a data-driven way. 

The all-in-one nature of the platform is another major strength. Candidates, companies, job orders, and the selection process are all managed in one place, with notes and fields that can be customized along each dimension. That makes it easy for the whole team to work efficiently while staying aligned, in a way that other systems do not quite match. 

The migration support also deserves special mention. Moving our data off the previous system was a genuinely difficult project, as the old system had no clean export function and its data fields were largely undefined, meaning we had to interpret what each field contained by hand. Our dedicated PORTERS representatives worked closely with us from the ground up, helping us understand the data structure together and supporting the migration from zero. That partnership was a major factor in getting us up and running successfully. 

If a company is still a one-person operation, a simple existing system may be perfectly adequate, and there may be no pressing need to change. But once a firm enters a growth stage, where data becomes increasingly important and volume rises, you need a system that is adaptable and can scale with you. For that situation, we would strongly recommend PORTERS. 

If you are looking ahead to future growth, adopting PORTERS from the outset is a sensible choice, because it saves you the considerable effort of migrating systems later on. Building on a scalable foundation early means you do not have to worry about outgrowing your tools down the line. 

We are not trying to build a firm of hundreds and hundreds of consultants like the large agencies. Our vision is to remain a boutique firm, roughly double our current size, running somewhere between 30 and 40 consultants who are highly specialized, very well trained, and deeply data-driven, so that we can cover our markets with real strength and dominate in that space. 

We want to be very well known and quite exclusive about who we work with, built on a foundation of well-trained, professional consultants. Reputation matters enormously in our market, and you can only build that kind of reputation by being deeply knowledgeable in your space. That is why retention and the depth of our consultants are so important to us. Rather than chasing scale with high turnover, we want to grow the depth of knowledge that makes Turnpoint a true specialist.