Acquiring the US firm Indeed (2012)

Betting on “search technology,” not “staffing scale”

The heart of this acquisition appears to lie in choosing, in going abroad, not an established-type staffing firm that promised sure cost savings but a loss-making technology start-up. Where the prior year’s Staff Service acquisition had aimed at gaining scale, the Indeed acquisition was a bet on the view that search technology would change the very way jobs and job-seekers connect. That, in the year he became president, he decided a deal of a size that could bear on confidence in his management if it failed — and did so amid a split within the company — hints at the character of President Minegishi’s judgment.

At the same time, this decision can be read as lying on a consistent movement away from self-reliance. Having turned toward M&A after failure in China, Recruit widened with Indeed a template of not rushing integration after an acquisition but leaving discretion to the local operation. Building on the earning power honed in paper magazines, this choice to take in from outside the next pillars — overseas, online, technology — was carried on into the later Glassdoor acquisition and others, and can be seen as the fork that pushed the company up from a domestic information firm into a global HR-technology company.