"At Recruit, our culture itself is our competitive advantage. And because culture isn't a system, it's extremely difficult to copy." So said Masumi Minegishi, then President and CEO of Recruit Holdings and now its Chairman of the Board, in a 2017 interview.
Recruit deals in something intangible: information. For decades, it has used that information to provide matching services across a wide range of industries. Along the way, it has embedded the values at the root of its culture — Wow the World, Bet on Passion, Prioritize Social Value — into its systems and day-to-day management. Through changes in how employees act and what they put into practice, those values have become a competitive advantage.
One way Recruit accelerates that change is through knowledge management. What does it take for a solution one employee finds in their daily work to be used across the whole organization, instead of staying with that one person or team? This article tells the story of the institution that makes that possible, the Recruit Management Competence Research Institute and its flagship initiative, FORUM.
A Specialized Organization The Recruit Management Competence Research Institute
In 1960, before it became the technology and HR company it is today, Recruit built its growth on a deceptively simple idea: print magazines that matched individual customers with the businesses that could serve them. Unlike a manufacturer, the company had no patents to rely on, so to keep the business growing, it needed to put the methods employees had learned through hands-on experience into words as shared “techniques,” organize them systematically, and build a structure for developing the whole organization. This approach was essential to staying competitive.
In the 1990s, Recruit began putting into words the techniques behind magazine editing, sales, and management, based on real cases from inside the company. The most essential of these were defined as "competencies" and turned into company-wide training programs. At the same time, as the pace of the business environment accelerated, Recruit started exploring knowledge management as a way to identify new competencies faster and spread them across the organization.
It was against this backdrop that a specialized organization, the Recruit Management Competence Research Institute, was launched in 2004. Its purpose was — and still is — to keep Recruit’s business growing by updating the company's core competencies, and by supporting both the advancement of corporate strategy and the execution of individual business strategies. It was envisioned as neither a typical HR training department nor an outward-facing academic body. "Research" here is a means, not an end, which makes it a genuinely unusual kind of institution.
Since its launch, the Institute has steadily honed one specific capability: finding success patterns that cross business and job-function lines, and turning them into something transferable. In other words, a competence in its own right. The results have been fed back into the company in multiple forms, from developing the next generation of leaders to putting business missions into words. FORUM, the Institute's longest-running and most broadly accessible initiative, is the clearest example of it in action.
A System for Circulating Knowledge Across Businesses and Job Functions
Every year, around 30 employees from Recruit Group in Japan take the stage and share their success stories, holding nothing back. It isn't simply a one-off award ceremony. It's a place to explain how a result was achieved and share it in a form anyone can reproduce. That is FORUM.
A presentation being recorded for FORUM. Footage is later combined with slides before it's distributed
FORUM dates back to 2008 and the TOPGUN AWARD, where sales employees presented success stories across the boundaries of the businesses they worked in. In 2015, Recruit expanded it into the four-category FORUM, adding engineering, corporate staff, and product/business-development roles alongside sales. Today it is open to around 17,000 employees across Recruit's operations in Japan.
Each year, around 160 entries reach the FORUM office after being selected within each business. They then go through an internal review by department heads, executives, and outside experts, who narrow the field to roughly 30 to 40 finalists. That's where the real work starts: staff at the Recruit Competence Institute work closely with each finalist, abstracting their business-specific success into a framework that can be applied across business and job functions.
Yuki Shima, who leads the Recruit Management Competence Research Institute, explains why FORUM matters: "We distinguish between two things. Know-how and tips are things you can use right away within the same business or job function. Knowledge is something that can be used widely, over the long term. FORUM exists to deliberately create the second kind, making it more reproducible and keeping it in circulation. From management's point of view, it's a showcase for strategy in action and a place to identify the next generation of leaders. For employees, it's a place to build skills that help in their daily work, and something to aspire to."
A Culture That Rewards Sharing Over Hoarding
A question often raised about knowledge-sharing programs is why anyone would go out of their way to reveal their own strengths. "I think it really comes down to a culture where sharing knowledge is seen as the cool thing to do," Shima says. At Recruit, he explains, people who turn their success into something the whole organization can repeat, tend to earn more respect — and a higher rating — than simply repeating that success alone, year after year.
FORUM is designed to embody this value. Care is taken to make sure it works not as a one-way award handed down by management, but as a place where recognition comes from fellow employees watching.
Turning Presentation Into Practice
FORUM doesn't end when the presentations do. Every session is archived, and with more than 500 videos built up so far, employees can access past knowledge at any time. To help them understand each case in more depth, Recruit has also built an AI chat tool that answers detailed questions about each presentation, along with opportunities to connect directly with the presenters, so the conversation can continue well after the event itself.
In one case, an employee in facilities management watched a presentation on a collaboration with the security industry and reached out to the presenter directly. Two days later, Recruit had introduced seated security posts in its own offices, with guards working sitting down rather than standing. The change reduced strain on guards' legs and lower backs, improved retention and morale, and also helped raise the quality of the security service. It remains the standard for security at Recruit's offices today.
Recruit's internal FORUM site, where employees can watch any past presentation on demand
In recent years, Recruit has also created opportunities to get advice from past FORUM presenters, such as, giving client-facing staff and data scientists a direct channel to consult with each other, and has started bundling presentations on related themes into formal training. For example, several project management cases from the product development area were reorganized into a single workshop, translating abstract knowledge into a form that is easier to put into practice. Asked about where he sees the program heading next, Shima replied, "We want to keep evolving how we share knowledge and create opportunities for employees, in whatever way serves Recruit Group best at any given time."
Turning Recruit’s Conglomerate Complexity Into a Strength
As FORUM shows, what the Recruit Management Competence Research Institute passes on is not just knowledge, but the culture of sharing knowledge itself. Shima explains why this matters so much to him, drawing on his own experience:
"Early in my career at Recruit, I went through the difficult experience of having a business I worked on get shut down. What gave me the courage to get through it were the stories of people who'd been through something similar before me. The moment we put our experiences into words, they no longer belong to us alone. That's true of successes, but it's also true when a project ends before it was supposed to. The insights gained along the way will always give a hint to whoever takes on the next challenge. Facing the facts of both success and failure, and doing the unglamorous work of recording that knowledge, I am convinced that this accumulation is the driving force that keeps renewing the value Recruit delivers."
Turning the knowledge generated across Recruit's many businesses and job functions into organization-wide learning, and then into new practice, is arguably at the core of what turns the complexity of running a conglomerate, with several businesses at different stages of growth, operating side by side, into a strength. It's one more way Recruit keeps connecting its culture to its competitive edge, and keeps moving forward.
Yuki Shima
General Manager, Recruit Competence Institute, Recruit Co., Ltd.
Shima joined Recruit in 2007 after graduating from university, starting on the editorial team of R25 within the company's business development division. He went on to launch and promote related media, and held a series of roles there, including editor-in-chief of R25, media planning department manager, sales management department manager, and head of the business development division. He joined the Recruit Competence Institute in 2017 to work on knowledge management, and has led the Institute since 2026.