In Japan, hiring entry-level graduates is nothing like posting a job and waiting for applications. Companies run year-long recruitment campaigns targeting students who all start work in April. Most hiring software is built for Western-style hiring and don’t fit this cycle. The few Japanese options that existed were clunky or incomplete — leaving recruiters to manage candidates across spreadsheets and email chains.

Bluum Hire was built specifically for this market. It gave recruiters a single pipeline view — post a role, track every candidate through each stage, and keep the whole hiring team on the same page across a campaign that could stretch over twelve months.

I joined the project during its first version and stayed through a full rebuild. I moved the codebase from a mix of languages to a single one used across the entire application (TypeScript), then reorganised it so the different parts of the product could be worked on and released independently.

I also set up the systems that kept the product running reliably — automated testing and deployment, email delivery for candidate notifications, and the infrastructure that served the application to users.

The project has since been closed, but the work shaped how I approach building products from early stage through to production.