Company history

In May 1973 Shinohara Kinko registered Temp Staff in Tokyo with capital of $2,555 (¥700,000). Born in 1934, she had gone to Australia as a secretary in 1971 and found workplaces where men and women were staffed without distinction, and a temporary-staffing industry that did not exist at home. She came back at thirty-eight to a Japanese labour market in which a married woman could not get even routine clerical work — which is what she set out to sell.

The obstacle was legal as much as commercial: under the reading then given to the Employment Security Act, dispatching workers sat in a grey zone. Shinohara sold the service to client companies not as dispatch but in the form of clerical processing subcontracting, working the telephone from a room in her own home, signing up registrants through her own contacts and matching them to demand she had to go out and find. What she assembled, in effect, was a broker for a flow labour market that had no legal existence.

The law then caught up with the business. The Worker Dispatch Act passed in 1985 and took effect in July 1986, giving the trade legal standing; Temp Staff registered under it and widened its scope just as the bubble economy produced a surge in clerical volume and a shortage of graduate hires at the same moment. Branches opened across the major cities and registrants reached the tens of thousands. Deregulation carried it further — the December 1999 amendment made dispatch a negative-list business, liberalized in principle, and the March 2004 amendment opened manufacturing. Moving in step with each loosening of the statute, and adding engineering and specialist dispatch through job-specific subsidiaries, Shinohara’s single-business company became one of the largest staffing firms in Japan while she was still attending registration sessions in person.

Temp Staff listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in March 2006 and was assigned to the First Section, with consolidated sales of roughly ¥180 billion and third place in the domestic staffing industry. Public capital changed what kind of company it was — institutional investors, an IR function, external audit and J-SOX internal controls — but its more consequential effect was optional: with further amendments to the dispatch law and a shake-out of the industry both expected, listing gave the company the means to pay for acquisitions.

It used them in October 2008, merging with People Staff — a clerical staffing rival founded in the same year, 1973, with a strong customer base in Chubu and Kansai — by share transfer into a new joint holding company, Temp Holdings. Temp Staff was delisted and became a wholly owned subsidiary. Measured by the partner the deal was modest: People Staff’s ¥30.1 billion of sales was a little over a tenth of Temp Staff’s ¥228.9 billion. Measured by the form, it was decisive. In November 2009 the holding company launched a tender offer for Nihon Techseed (today Persol Cross Technology), an engineering-dispatch firm and the group’s first step outside clerical work. Sales for the year to March 2010 were ¥224.6 billion with net profit of ¥2.95 billion, in an industry contracting hard after Lehman — and the structure that would absorb nine straight years of acquisitions was already in place.

In April 2013 Temp Holdings bought Intelligence Holdings — spun out of Recruit in 1989, owner of the DODA (now doda) job-change media, the part-time listings title an and a graduate-recruiting business — for about $526.6M (¥51bn) including advisory fees, against Intelligence’s ¥69.8 billion of sales in the year to March 2012. Dispatch, placement and recruitment advertising now sat under one holding company. Consolidated sales rose from ¥233.2 billion in FY11 to ¥362.4 billion in FY13 and ¥401.0 billion in FY14, where the operating margin was still 5.85% — scale bought rather than grown, in pursuit of the industry leader, Recruit.

Overseas expansion followed the same method. A 2010 share purchase agreement with the American staffing group Kelly Services became, in July 2016, a joint venture under which Kelly Services (Singapore) and sixteen subsidiaries across ASEAN and South Asia moved onto Temp Holdings’ balance sheet — Kelly’s brand and customers, Japanese capital. Panasonic AVC Technology (2013), Panasonic Excel Staff and P&P Holdings (2015) added engineering, manufacturing and sales-promotion staffing. By FY14 the group had more than twenty consolidated subsidiaries and 12,587 employees.

In July 2017 the holding company renamed itself Persol Holdings and put the Persol prefix on every subsidiary, discarding the Temp Staff name used for forty-three years — a statement that the federation was meant to be one company. Three months later it acquired the ASX-listed Programmed Maintenance Services for ¥69.1 billion; Programmed had A$2.691 billion of sales, some ¥235 billion. FY17 sales reached ¥722.1 billion and goodwill ¥102.1 billion, with the operating margin holding at 5.0%. The warning came in the same accounts: of ¥14.6 billion in extraordinary losses, ¥5.6 billion were impairments at PERSOL KELLY subsidiaries and ¥8.6 billion in recruiting. And in June 2017 Shinohara left the board after forty-four years, holding 11.25% herself with 5.22% moved to her foundation; Mizuta Masamichi, who had joined through the Intelligence deal and run its integration, took over as CEO.

Mizuta spent his presidency folding in what had been bought. In October 2018 seven dispatch subsidiaries were merged into Persol Temp Staff and three BPO firms into one — ten companies reorganized at a stroke. Avantistaff was acquired in 2019, and the Fuji Xerox Learning Institute (now Persol Research and Consulting) took the group into training. In October 2019 the group vision became “Work and Smile,” recasting the founder’s argument about women and work as a purpose for the whole federation; a month later Persol closed an, the 1982 part-time listings title that had been one of the industry’s big three, and concentrated its recruiting resources on doda.

In April 2020 the group moved to five Strategic Business Units — Staffing, Career, Professional Outsourcing, Asia Pacific and Solution — devolving operating authority to SBU heads and leaving the holding company with strategy and capital allocation. COVID arrived in the same month. FY20 sales slipped to ¥950.7 billion and operating profit fell 34% to ¥25.7 billion, while Asia Pacific turned ¥251.4 billion of sales into a ¥2.2 billion operating loss — its third consecutive loss since Programmed. Wada Takao, a Temp Staff insider who had run the Staffing SBU, succeeded Mizuta with two tasks: fix Asia Pacific, grow Career. FY21 recovered to ¥1,060.8 billion of sales and ¥48.1 billion of operating profit, but the spread had widened: Career at 9.84%, Staffing at 6.88%, Asia Pacific at 0.36%.

The response was to keep tidying. In January 2023 three engineering firms were merged into Persol Cross Technology; in April the Solution SBU was replaced by a BPO SBU; and from the first quarter of the year to March 2024 Persol voluntarily adopted IFRS, so that overseas investors could compare the Australian business with its peers. Scale kept climbing — ¥1,327.1 billion in FY23 and ¥1,451.2 billion in FY24, roughly double the figure of the year Shinohara stepped down — while the operating margin fell from 5.85% in FY14 to below 4%. FY24 shows why plainly enough: Career, grown in-house around doda, earned ¥30.4 billion on ¥142.4 billion of sales, a 21.3% margin; Asia Pacific, bought, earned ¥11.7 billion on ¥476.1 billion, a margin of 2.46% — a gap of roughly ten times. Shinohara still held 11.74% at the end of March 2025, and 18.78% counting her foundation. What she handed on was a federation; what remains unfinished is making it one company.