Uniqueness and potential of Japanese, other Asian markets

[00:00:13] Welcome to episode 90 of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast. I am Stephen Rothberg, the founder of College Recruiter Job Search Site, one of your co-hosts. You can see from the different background behind me and behind Peter that we are both in not our usual locations, undisclosed locations. I'm actually near Philadelphia at my son's place. Peter, where are you now that we're kind of getting into 2025?

[00:00:40] I'm about 120 miles or 200 kilometers north of you in northern New Jersey at my son's place. And happy New Year. I hope you slept well on New Year's Eve slash New Year's Day. I hope all is well with you. And I am Peter Zolman of the AIM Group.

[00:01:04] We provide business intelligence to job boards and recruitment marketplaces. And our guest today is Kaori Kido. She's Global Business Development Manager of Kakaku. They operate Kusinbox in Japan, which is a job board slash recruitment marketplace.

[00:01:26] We met her at RecBuzz last year. And she's joining us from Tokyo in the middle of the night or early morning there. So thank you for staying up so late. Sorry to disrupt your usual sleep, but we'll get started. First of all, just tell us a little bit about how you joined Kakaku and how you moved from venture capital into the job board side of the business.

[00:01:55] Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me today. I'm glad to be here. Yeah. My name is Kaori. I'm a Global Business Development Manager at Kakaku, a publicly traded media company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

[00:02:09] Actually, we are not an HR focused company, but a diversified media company that operates around 20 websites in various categories. For example, we have a price comparison site and restaurant review site and more. And one of our major piters is our job board business.

[00:02:28] And in Japan, we have been operating under the brand name Kusinbox since 2015. And about 11 million Japanese users visit our site every month. Like other aggregators worldwide, we do the CPC model for monetization.

[00:02:43] On top of that, we have been operating under the brand name. And on top of that, in the past few years, we have also started expanding overseas. We have opened site in the US and Singapore under another brand name JobCube.

[00:02:55] And we plan to open more in the future. And me, actually, I joined Kakaku as a corporate venture capital at first. But, as I said, we started global expansion as our HR business.

[00:03:14] So, that's why now I'm dedicated to global expansion or global alliances in this sector.

[00:03:20] Excellent. Thank you. That's really great. So, if I understand correctly, so, in Japan, the business model is you're mostly selling job postings, CV search to employers, staff and companies.

[00:03:39] In other markets like Singapore and the United States, you're more of an aggregator, like buying and selling traffic between job boards. Is that correct?

[00:03:51] Yes, correct. You know, we started our business as an aggregator in Japan. It's similar to what we are doing in the US.

[00:03:59] Oh.

[00:03:59] But now, you know, moving into more job board business, which means that we have our own sales team and we, you know, we directly connected our direct client now.

[00:04:11] How is the Japanese recruitment marketplace different from the marketplaces in the United States and in the Western countries?

[00:04:26] Is it substantially different from the US and Western countries or is it pretty much the same?

[00:04:33] Thanks for a great question.

[00:04:34] This is not to say that Japanese Japan is unique, but paper post PPP type of job boards still dominate in Japan.

[00:04:43] But this is simply because the shift to CPC models hasn't fully taken hold yet.

[00:04:48] So, many companies in Japan are not yet familiar with CPC, but I believe CPC aggregators like us will gain more traction over time, just like it was in the Western countries.

[00:05:00] But having said that, it's unlikely that Japan will see the kind of mutual traffic sharing and coexistence among aggregators that exist in the US.

[00:05:11] So, I think there are some special reasons.

[00:05:14] One, ATS have a low adoption rate in Japan, reportedly under 30%, meaning the market lacks structured job postings.

[00:05:23] So, I think, you know, smarter aggregators may struggle to access a wide range of job ads.

[00:05:30] And also, cultural factors play a big role too.

[00:05:35] Japanese people tend to be cautious or, I would say, conservative, which results in fewer applications per job, around 20 on average.

[00:05:45] I think this is roughly one-tenth of the US.

[00:05:49] So, this means only the top tier aggregators are likely to survive.

[00:05:53] Hey, everybody.

[00:05:55] It's Libby again with fearlessness.

[00:05:57] So, what's fearlessness?

[00:05:58] It's that underlying grit that empowers us to forge ahead, even when hope seems distant.

[00:06:03] It's the courage to walk through those fires of hell, knowing that we're going to come out better and stronger on the other side.

[00:06:09] Stay tuned and learn how to get fearlessness.

[00:06:12] Oh, interesting.

[00:06:13] So, as a lot of the listeners, whether they're watching on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, or listening on Apple Music or Spotify,

[00:06:24] probably know that one of the world's biggest recruitment companies and the world's biggest job board is a competitor of yours, right?

[00:06:33] Recruit Holdings, Owns Indeed, Glassdoor, Simply Hired, et cetera, Workopolis, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:06:40] Does it make it easier for you because they're big and they've sort of created some of the market?

[00:06:48] And then you can now come in and say, hey, maybe they were first.

[00:06:52] Maybe they were bigger, but we're better?

[00:06:55] Or does that create more problems for you where your customers might say, oh, you know, they're bigger, so we're going to go with them?

[00:07:06] What are some of the pluses and minuses?

[00:07:10] When we started our business 10 years ago, many pay-per-post type of joke boards were already active, penetrated in Japan.

[00:07:19] But platforms like Mainavi and Rikunabi and having incredibly powerful players for about 20 years, but Indeed were the only aggregator in the market at that time.

[00:07:31] So, as CPC has become more widespread in the market, we have been able to steadily grow together with Indeed.

[00:07:39] So, and this trend is likely to continue.

[00:07:42] And I would say there is still huge room for growth for CPC aggregators, I think.

[00:07:48] But yeah, as I mentioned, like, you know, platforms like Mainavi and Rikunabi, they're really huge.

[00:07:54] But however, their main business focus is still on agency services rather than media like us.

[00:08:00] So, while they are strong competitors, but they are also our clients, we sell traffic to them and we'll maintain a corporate relationship.

[00:08:10] We call that coopetition.

[00:08:12] We cooperate and we compete.

[00:08:15] Yeah.

[00:08:16] Peter?

[00:08:17] Peter, do you feel that the cultural differences between Japan and the Western countries make it easier for a Japanese company like Kakaku?

[00:08:33] Is it easier for you to operate in Japan than it is in the States?

[00:08:39] Or are you able to bridge that gap and operate effectively in both markets and Singapore as well?

[00:08:50] Because there are, as you mentioned, a lot of cultural differences.

[00:08:54] Yeah, I think, you know, it will be really difficult to expand when we think only in the U.S. market.

[00:09:01] The reason we choose the U.S. as our first market is because it's a huge market.

[00:09:06] Of course, as you said, we see a huge cultural gap between the U.S. in the Western countries, including U.S. and Japan.

[00:09:16] But however, you know, in this industry, it is important to connect with various other companies in the same industry.

[00:09:24] So that is why we choose the U.S. first.

[00:09:27] Going back to the answer to your question, yes, the gap is really big.

[00:09:33] But we would like to stick to aggregator type of business model, which means that we don't have a plan to have our own sales team for other global markets except Japan.

[00:09:46] And we are going to work with other aggregators, other job boards, other programmatic providers, and then monetize based on CPC model.

[00:09:59] So that makes it easier to, you know, make money rather than having our own sales clients.

[00:10:08] That makes a lot of sense.

[00:10:10] Has there been anything that your organization has learned from operating in the U.S. and Singapore during the last couple of years?

[00:10:21] Or that you've brought back to Japan?

[00:10:23] Like, oh, you know, they're doing this in Singapore.

[00:10:26] They're doing that in the U.S.

[00:10:28] We should do that in Japan.

[00:10:31] If I'm talking about, you know, global expansion alone, yeah, I do recognize that it's very challenging.

[00:10:38] So, of course, we'll continue to expand into multiple countries.

[00:10:42] But at the very least, we also recognize that there are limits to how much we can grow by ourselves, like in Japan, like what we are doing in Japan.

[00:10:52] And we also need to speed up our expansion process.

[00:10:55] So now we want to be flexible, actively pursuing strategic partnerships, including, you know, M&A or venture investment with companies that have values we do not have.

[00:11:08] Peter, I think we have time for one more question.

[00:11:11] Do you want to grab it?

[00:11:12] Sure.

[00:11:13] So, Kauri, do you think you're going to move into other countries or are you going to wait until you get a little more experience in the U.S. and Singapore?

[00:11:23] Where are you going next?

[00:11:25] Other than to bed, because it's after midnight your time.

[00:11:29] Yeah.

[00:11:30] 20 after 1 a.m.

[00:11:34] Thank you for staying up so late, of course.

[00:11:39] It's not being decided yet.

[00:11:42] But definitely, you know, Germany is a huge market.

[00:11:46] But as a media company, we are strong in SEO and content creation.

[00:11:50] So our focus remains on enhancing our media value, both in Japan and U.S. or Singapore, but even, you know, Germany or other countries as well.

[00:11:59] So we like to test other countries as by, you know, expanding to other countries in order to find, you know, a good market for monetization.

[00:12:10] Thank you for joining us.

[00:12:13] I hope to see you at RecBuzz again.

[00:12:16] This year it will be in Vienna in just a few months.

[00:12:20] And we are totally looking forward to seeing you.

[00:12:25] Thank you for staying up so late.

[00:12:27] For people who want to learn more, they can go to kakaku.com.

[00:12:32] They can go to your LinkedIn page.

[00:12:34] They can go to JobCube.

[00:12:36] They can go to Kuzhinbox in Japan.

[00:12:40] It'll all be in kanji, so it'll be a little tough for Westerners to read it.

[00:12:46] But Kaori, thank you very much for staying up so late and joining us.

[00:12:52] Stephen, what can I say?

[00:12:54] Thank you as well for managing the process.

[00:12:59] Awesome.

[00:13:00] Happy New Year.

[00:13:02] Kaori, Happy New Year.

[00:13:04] Thank you so much for sharing.

[00:13:06] Happy New Year.

[00:13:07] Thank you.

[00:13:08] Bye-bye.

[00:13:09] Arigato.

[00:13:10] Arigato.