Endeavor to correctly understand the current status of each business segment from the CEO’s perspective, thus supporting business management with an eye to the future.

Broadly speaking, I have two major roles to play. One, as the Chief of Staff, supporting CEO, Hisayuki Idekoba. It’s an unfamiliar job title in Japan, isn’t it? I scoured the internet and asked my colleagues working in the role of Chief of Staff attached to other officers, but I discovered that this was a job title about which little to nothing was defined. However, I decided to stay positive, and in short, I’ll do anything the CEO requires of me. Without defining the scope of my work, I will consider what I can do for the growth of the company and carry out what I think should be done. Thinking simply that way, I make it a practice to help draw up materials for the CEO’s external and internal presentations, participate in meetings on various projects and management themes, and assist him with their implementation and promotion. I’m always conscious to seek out what I should do to move things forward. I examine in an unbiased manner to determine how to overcome a challenge, and connect dots by making use of information obtained through cooperation with various departments, resolving issues preemptively and doing similar things in an effort to make organizations and projects move in a simpler and faster way.

My other role is as the head of the Business Performance Management Department. The Business Performance Management Department gathers and consolidates business and financial information in collaboration with the FP&A teams of each business segment, and based on the latest business trends, forecasts and shares them with the sections such as the management, IR, and other finance teams. The Recruit Group: “HR Technology,” “Staffing,” and “Matching & Solutions,” which possesses an outstanding customer base, mainly in Japan, and where new businesses focused on SaaS solutions show promising growth. These business segments are characteristic in that their operations and are autonomous and self-sustaining, while all possessing different rules and culture, and consistently and rapidly changing. Our key role is to appropriately identify and communicate the present status and future prospects of each business segment to the capital market and internal/external stakeholders in a precise and timely manner, and in a way that is consistent with the Group’s management strategy as well as the particularities of each segment. The Business Performance Management Department, which centers around this question, must continue changing and evolving while striking a balance between respecting the management autonomy of each unique segment, while allowing the Recruit Holdings to make group wide decisions.

Scope of work expands as a result of seizing every challenging opportunity in front of me.

I have worked mainly in business facing roles since joining the Company in 1999 as a new graduate. Starting within the education business, and then other areas such as HR related services, then on to various parts of Indeed’s business. Throughout those experiences I noticed one thing in common at different to roles which was that the driving force for each individual was their passion to “want to make the world a better place.” Our CEO, Mr. Idekoba, who hails from the product development segment, is a person whose sole purpose is finding ways of making job hunting and employment simpler for both job seekers and employers. Even though he’s now become the Group CEO, he still reaches out to me unexpectedly through chat with links to database queries. It is rare to find CEOs who get hands on with the databases themselves, isn’t it? Moreover, he actually tries to act on the ideas that come to him, and even if things go wrong he patiently goes through trial and error, always saying “What should I try next?” He is such a tenacious man. We overcome diverse barriers together supporting the business while valuing our sense of work on the front line, providing new products and services to the world. It is when I receive positive feedback from users and clients enjoying greater convenience, that I feel my job is truly interesting.

I have been allowed to experience a wide range of things at Indeed, and fundamentally, I’m a “jack-of-all-trades” type of person, so it is not as though I had a particular career vision that I mapped out my career goals and worked toward them. I am not a renowned specialist in any particular area, either. Even so, I’ve taken on any challenge when given an opportunity, and I have done so with fresh eyes with the belief that it would help the company or the business. In the course of such challenges, I have always repeated the practice of understanding the whole picture and setting out to resolve individual problems I’ve identified to move forward. At Indeed for example, I took part in a project which was not proceeding as expected despite the participation of a number of excellent specialists. Eventually, based on my past experience I was able to help realize smooth progress by ensuring an environment favorable to the project by doing things such as removing obstacles and bottlenecks and preemptively taking steps to solve problems which I thought would arise as the project progressed. Through my various business experiences, I honed my coordination abilities, which unconsciously became my strength. This strength was even applicable abroad, and allowed me to move projects forward while anticipating reactions from the person-to-person chemistry that arise when diverse people come together, as well as the problems and presumed issues that can arise in such cases.

If you don’t restrict your own roles and jobs, you will be able to experience a variety of work beyond what you’ve imagined before entering the Company, and in the process, discover new possibilities. I think this is one of the real thrills you can enjoy working with Recruit. If you accept the opportunity in front of you with an open attitude and an eagerness to accept challenges, you will always receive caring support from those around you, and the people involved in that process will surely have kind words, thus naturally broadening the scope of your work. You’ll never be bored as new opportunities arise, one after another. If that were not the case, you wouldn’t be able to continue working for more than 20 years, like I have. (haha)

Nothing makes me happier than to be part of a vortex of propulsion that generates “new value.”

I don’t find it interesting to think of work as an assigned task. I don’t deny that “work is work,” but wouldn’t we like to enjoy our work? I think so, and would want my colleagues to think so too. By undertaking work while asking yourself---“What is the objective of each job?”, “What will improve by doing this?” and “How will it benefit users and clients?”---you will find the outcome of a particular task is very different depending on the doer. Accept an opportunity which is in front of you with an open mind and do whatever you think is interesting. If you are able to do work with such an attitude, you’ll surely enjoy working, won’t you?

I love Recruit so much because the company is driven by the genuine passion of each and every employee to make the world better and more convenient. And I feel supremely happy to be part of the vortex of propulsion that generates “new value” by providing products and services. Going forward, I think our company will continue to constantly change and evolve and consequently the sort of work required of its staff will continue to change. I, myself, expect to do whatever I can while trying various new things. And, I would like to devote the experience I’ve gained to the company, so that I can bring out the WILL to succeed to the maximum extent in my colleagues who share Recruit Group’s vision and mission and have passion to take on something new and challenging.