Launching the recruiting magazine An Invitation to Companies (1962)

The invention of “making information pay through advertising”

The heart of this launch was not the single magazine itself but the invention of a business form: gathering job information into one publication funded entirely by advertising fees from the companies listed in it. Students received the information, companies gained a point of contact with talent, and advertisers bore the cost. By meshing three parties’ interests on a single booklet, Recruit turned from an agency that placed advertising into others’ media into the side that owned the very place where information collects. Designing a place where individuals and companies meet and drawing value from both — the prototype of the structure later called the “ribbon model” can be seen to have begun in this one magazine from a tiny company.

That said, in 1962 the people involved almost certainly did not foresee that this would become the starting point of a company worth trillions of yen. To gather advertisers for an unknown booklet, there was nothing for it but to visit each prospect in person, bow, and even ask customers about the content of the pages themselves; the launch stood on an accumulation of gritty door-to-door selling. Even so, the form — concentrating the information of a particular field and making it pay through advertising — carried a universality transplantable to life domains such as housing, job-changing and used cars. This one magazine, which asked first “how to design the place where information collects” before chasing scale, was the choice that fixed the character of the company called Recruit at an early stage.