TOKYO – Sansan, Inc. announces its Eight business card scanning and management app has been fully updated into an app that not only supports users’ contact management but also their career development.

This new Eight will include career-related functionality offering company information and other features to support users as they advance in their professional lives. The newly evolved Eight lets users obtain information useful specifically to them as they efficiently shape their careers through the app. Sansan will continue to enhance Eight’s features going forward.

Background behind this evolution
In recent years, self-directed career development, in which professionals shape their own careers as opposed to company-led career development, has been attracting attention. Moreover, given the current rapidly changing business environment, Sansan believes in the growing importance of each working person to independently acquire skills and shape their careers. In actuality, though, a Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) survey of companies found that employees independently develop their careers at only 20% of the companies surveyed. This highlights the upcoming need to shift emphasis toward workers’ self-directed career development.¹

Since its 2012 launch, the Eight app has served professionals as a lifetime service that provides opportunities to meet people and supports users in developing their networks and their careers. As of November 30, 2021, Eight had more than 3 million users. Users can use the app to manage their human networks developed through business card exchanges. They can also digitize their past and present business cards and gather information about their own careers using career summary and skill tag features. Eight also provides users with information and opportunities to help them shape their careers, including business events for learning and improving skills, and interactions with companies, which could lead to career changes.

Eight is now evolving from a business card scanning and contact management app into an app that also, even more strongly, helps professionals shape their own careers. While retaining its existing functions, the new Eight includes a tab providing large amounts of career information. Sansan has accordingly updated Eight’s tagline from “Business card-based professional social network” to “Manage your contacts and your career.” This indicates Eight’s appeal as a tool for career development and career change, along with contact management.

Major features of Eight: Manage your contacts and your career

New feature: Find career information
The new career tab in Eight lets users gather information useful for improving their skills, information about companies they might not have previously been aware of, and employment information. This information is sorted by job type when displayed. The tab already contains information about sales positions, and information about other types of job will be added.

1. Skills report
Users can learn skills for developing their career, anytime and anywhere. Each report article briefly introduces skills while videos include full-length explanations. This lets users effectively use their spare time to gain learning opportunities whenever they want.

2. Company report
Under the theme, “Know companies. Know businesses.” Eight will be representative of a variety of companies and introduce them through reports and videos. Users can follow companies for which they view a video that interests them. This lets them collect information about the company within Eight, including news and updates.

3. Employment information
Employment information from companies using Eight Career Design will be displayed based on each user’s attributes. Users can apply for jobs being offered by companies with which they have had contact and/or they became interested in at events or via reports.

4. Online events
Attending real-time online events helps users improve their skills and develop their careers. Each event starts accepting applications to take part 10 minutes before it is held. Users can easily join, with no filling out of forms.² Eight users can also get notified about upcoming events so they won’t miss out on those that interest them.

Contact profiles
Users can scan and enter their own business card to store their exact information, including their company and job title. They can create their own career profile by entering a career summary, job history, educational background, and skill tags. They can then update their profile if they change positions or companies, to maintain an accurate, ongoing portrait of their career.

In Eight, paper business cards are scanned using a proprietary combination of optical character recognition (OCR) and secure human input to digitize each card quickly and accurately.

Network with your contacts
Eight lets users easily manage and search for contacts in their networks. Searches can be refined using personally set tags, job type, area, position, skill tags, and other attributes. Users can also expand their network via mutual acquaintances.³

Stay up to date
Users are notified of career changes, promotions, job transfers, and other updates for contacts in their Eight network. They can also like and comment on users’ updates, helping to stay connected after exchanging business cards.

Scouting by companies
Users will receive information about companies and can be scouted by companies by setting their level of intent to change jobs. This function will let users meet companies with which they did not have a contact point, thus gaining job-change opportunities.

Future updates
Eight previously required users to sign up using their own physical business card, but Sansan is developing a feature to enable business card-free usage. Eight will reflect the growing diversity of workstyles, appealing to a wider array of professionals by not only requiring use with paper cards. Sansan is also developing a function to enable two-way communication between users and companies on Eight, with the aim of fostering fans of companies and supporting human-resource matching between people and companies. Sansan aims to implement both of these features in the coming summer.

Eight will continue to evolve to support personal career development.

Notes
¹ Source: Data from Japan Business Federation, Society 5.0 jidai wo kirihiraku jinzai-no ikusei (development of human resources who will initiate the Society 5.0 era) (March 17, 2020) partially processed by Sansan
https://www.keidanren.or.jp/policy/2020/021_honbun.pdf
² Each event will be available for viewing when the user has exchanged online business cards with the host.
³ Eight Premium registration is required to use the feature that visualizes mutual acquaintances.

■About Sansan, Inc.
With its mission of “Turning encounters into innovation,” Sansan provides an ever-expanding suite of software tools that serve as business infrastructure and drive digital transformation. Its two mainstay products are the namesake Sansan B2B service for sales DX for companies and the Eight app contact and career management app for individual professionals. Sansan also offers cloud-based invoice management with its Bill One platform, as well as intelligent event coordination with Seminar One. Sansan’s technologies are continually evolving to accommodate modern, hybrid workstyles.

Established: June 11, 2007
Website: https://www.corp-sansan.com
Head Office: 13th Floor, Aoyama Oval Building, 5-52-2, Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 150-0001, Japan
Capital: 6,414 million yen (as of February 28, 2022)
Business: Planning, development, and sales of cloud-based contact management services

■Contact for press inquiries
Sansan Inc. Brand Communication Dept.
Email: pr@sansan.com