Japan’s Recruit Co. Acquires Indeed.com To Extend Jobs Reach From US To Asia

Amid all the recent brouhaha over why Craigslist has failed to improve for so long (in part leading to frustrated developers building things) the entire classifieds market continues to chug along in its various guises. One of those is the more formal recruitment industry – and today Recruit Co. Ltd, a provider of HR and information services based in Japan, has acquired Indeed.com, a highly trafficked jobs site best known in North America. Terms were not disclosed but given that there were signs Indeed was planning to IPO, the price may well have been close to $1bn. Co-founders Paul Forster and Rony Kahan are staying on in the new guise.

Indeed launched in 2004 as a search engine for jobs and is now available in 50+ countries, 26 languages and claims to have 80 million unique visitors per month, 25,000 employer clients and to be the top external source of hires in the US.

But it lacked exposure in Asia, which is what the linkup with Recruit Co will achieve. This follows to trend of other Japanese companies acquiring EU/US players, such as Rakuten and Dentsu. Furthermore, in a statement Masumi Minegishi, CEO of Recruit, said “Recruit aspires to be the leader in HR and recruitment services worldwide.”

In the light of DMGT’s recent acquisition of Jobrapido as well, job search is becoming a hotter space than we perhaps traditionally thought. One to watch here in the UK is Adzuna which has taken a more modern approach with social search and market stats.