Recruit Holdings has been listed on the First Section (current Prime Market) of the Tokyo Stock Exchange since 2014. Junichi Arai has been working on investor relations since shortly after the listing, and became CFO in 2025. We spoke with him about what he has found compelling about Recruit over the past 10 years, and where he sees the Company heading next.

Junichi Arai, Managing Corporate Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd.

Good Results Alone Don’t Tell the Whole Story. The Real Work Was Making the Case for Dialogue.

Junichi joined Recruit Holdings in 2016 after spending nearly 30 years in corporate finance businesses at global investment banks.

“My relationship with Recruit actually predates my joining. I had been advising the former president, Hitoshi Kashiwagi, and the finance team for some years, and I also supported the Company’s IPO.”

So why did Junichi choose to join Recruit Holdings as a corporate executive?

“Even before joining, I had been trying to understand how investors, and by extension society, evaluated Recruit. To put it simply, Recruit was difficult for people to understand. Its business areas were broad, and it had many businesses, so it was hard to grasp. In earnings announcements were rich with content and full of updates, but from an investor’s perspective, the impression was, ‘It delivers on its numbers, but there’s no real excitement around it.’ I felt that Recruit Holdings’ true value was not being fully recognized by the capital markets.”

Junichi’s read of the situation aligned with management’s own thinking, that steps needed to be made to communicate the Company’s value more effectively. “I wanted to put to the test — from inside a company this time — the experience and hypotheses I had built up. I wanted to take on that challenge at Recruit Holdings, a company that can compete globally,” he says.

But the path was not easy. The first thing he faced was a difference in how he and management viewed “dialogue with the capital markets.”

“At the time, shortly after the Company had become listed, I don’t think we placed as much emphasis as we do today on how we were evaluated by the world, in other words, by global capital markets and institutional investors. We communicated earnestly and carefully, saying, ‘Recently, our results were exactly as we had forecast. This is our outlook for this year. We will make sure to achieve it.’ But in order to have our corporate value properly evaluated, we need to help people picture our medium- to long-term growth, including revenue and profit growth, and to encourage them to acquire and continue holding our shares. That is qualitatively very different. Simply reporting what exists today does not raise expectations. So I developed my own hypotheses about what would be useful to communicate and what overseas institutional investors might want to know. I spoke with people inside and outside the Company and brought proposals to management. In short, soon after joining, I was telling people that many of the things they had been doing were not working.”

He laughs at the memory; management’s initial reaction was not enthusiastic. Still, he never let go of his belief in raising Recruit’s standing in the capital markets.

“When we attract attention and expectations from society, raise our valuation, increase our market capitalization, and sustain that position, only then do the options available to the Company and the scope of what it can do expand. You could say that the Company gains the capacity to create new value. For Recruit, which has ‘Wow the World’ as one of its values, I believed this was something we had to achieve for medium- to long-term growth.”

For Junichi, maximizing enterprise value as CFO means prioritizing ongoing dialogue with global capital markets. He sees his role as “translating” the thinking and ambition behind the numbers into language that institutional investors can act on. Junichi uses the phrase “raising the valuation multiple” to describe his contribution.

“If the business grows and profits double, but market capitalization only doubles in the same way, then I have added no value in my role. What matters is how much we can raise the valuation multiples of Recruit Holdings as a company, driven by multiple factors including expectations for the future.”

“Recruit Group has a wealth of content to talk about, and that is a fortunate problem to have. But that is exactly why we need to design what we spend time on and whose words we use to deliver the message. For investors, Recruit Holdings is just one of many stocks. The time they can spend getting to know us is limited. Dialogue only works if it aligns with what the other party actually cares about.”

Junichi also points to a difficulty that arises precisely from Recruit’s constant evolution.

“Recruit’s business models continue to change, so things do not always unfold the way we described them two or three years ago. Disclosing figures that are subject to change can sometimes create confusion for investors. The fact that we are different each time can be received positively; other times, people react with the question, ‘It changed again?’ Getting ahead of that misunderstanding is part of the job.

Reflecting on the past decade, Junichi says, “Compared with when I first joined, our internal mindset has changed significantly through dialogue with investors and other efforts. I think we have become a team that places a high priority on questions such as, ‘How do we earn a proper valuation?’ and ‘How do we avoid being misread?’”

Once Convinced, Recruit Moves Fast. And Teams That Play to Individual Strengths Are a Big Part of Why.

Junichi spends much of his time communicating the Company’s potential to the outside world, but he is quick to point out that Recruit’s strengths run deeper than any investor pitch. Through his experience as an executive, he has come to appreciate two qualities that make the company unique.

“First, as was the case with my proposal to management soon after joining, I was surprised by how quickly the Company moves once it is convinced. It takes a certain amount of time to reach agreement, but once people are convinced, they move into action almost as if to say, ‘Let’s evolve quickly.’ The Company rarely stops because ‘this is how we have done it until now.’ It has a clear stance of, ‘If it is the right thing to do, we should do it.’ People move fast, and once they commit, they follow through. That was genuinely unexpected and quite different from the impression I had before joining.”

Another strength Junichi points to is the way teams are built around complementary strengths.

“There is a way of thinking that if someone does not know something, someone who does can support them. We do not force people into a mold by saying, ‘A person in this position, for example the CEO, must be able to do this and that.’ The idea that distinctive strengths matter has permeated the Company, and I feel that is a source of our strength. Because people are not perfect, we make the most of each individual as they are and win as a team. In an organization where that is simply the norm, I think it becomes easier to have open discussions without excessive deference.”

I Want to Back Challenges That Wow the World

For Recruit Group’s further growth, Junichi says he wants to focus over the medium- to long-term on supporting people and organizations that take on challenges. He believes that having more people who know what they want to do and can connect that ambition to business growth will be essential for Recruit’s evolution.

“I feel that Deko (Recruit Holding’s CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba) has become increasingly charismatic. He has a strong image as someone who has succeeded, and he continues to evolve, so I understand why people on the front lines of the business tend to defer to his judgement. But I want more people to come forward and say, ‘Even so, this is what I want to do,’ and take on new challenges. I want to support those people well from a financial perspective.

“For example, Deko describes his own role as ‘regulating the overall impact of failures and creating new value.’ If I apply that to myself, I think my role is to make Recruit Holdings’ enterprise value as large as possible, absorb the impact of failures, and in doing so raise the Company’s tolerance for risk — maximizing the possibility that one of those challenges will grow significantly and return large value to society. There are many types of CFOs, but at Recruit, I strive to be a CFO who can encourage challenges boldly and proactively, while remaining sincere and highly transparent.”

In the financial results for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, announced on May 15, 2026, Recruit Holdings’ consolidated results showed both revenue and profit growth. Revenue, EBITDA+S^*1, and basic EPS^*2 all reached record highs. How Recruit Group builds on that — and what challenges emerge next — is a story worth following.

Junichi Arai

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd.

Joined Lehman Brothers Japan Inc. in 1988. In 1999, assumed the role of Head of M&A Advisory at Morgan Stanley Japan Limited (now Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co., Ltd.). In 2007, appointed Managing Director and Head of the Strategic Advisory Group in the Investment Banking Division at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Co., Ltd. (now Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co., Ltd.). Joined Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd. as Senior Professional Officer in November 2016, became Executive Officer in April 2018, and was appointed Director of Recruit Co., Ltd. in April 2023. Since April 2025, has been serving as Senior Managing Corporate Executive Officer and CFO of Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd., overseeing the company’s finance functions.