Matching people with jobs is a bit like pairing people with clothes, according to the first female foreign board director of Recruit Holdings Co., owner of Indeed.com, the world’s biggest employment portal.
(Bloomberg) — Matching people with jobs is a bit like pairing people with clothes, according to the first female foreign board director of Recruit Holdings Co., owner of Indeed.com, the world’s biggest employment portal.
Katrina Lake, 40, would know. She founded Stitch Fix Inc. and took the online apparel startup public in 2017, becoming the youngest woman — at the time — ever to do so in the US. Given that Recruit and Stitch Fix use vast amounts of data to connect people, “both have a very human-centric way of looking at the world,” she said.
With an aging and shrinking population exacerbating a labor shortage, businesses in Japan are facing pressure to better harness artificial intelligence. Lake’s goal is to bring her experience as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to accelerate Recruit’s efforts to simplify the hiring process.
“This intersection of how do we think about AI and society, and how do jobs play with that, is a very exciting and interesting space right now,” Lake said in her first interview since joining the board this week. “Recruit was just a really obvious company for me to be excited about, given my background and what I feel like I can contribute.”
Although its name is relatively unknown outside Japan, Recruit is one of the country’s biggest companies, ranked in the top 25 with a market value of ¥7.8 trillion ($54 billion). While it started as a job listings and staffing provider, its web footprint is vast, bringing staffing portals, real estate listings, restaurant reviews, online payments, travel services and a matchmaking portal under a single roof.
Lake founded Stitch Fix in 2011 while attending Harvard Business School. Its “human-in-the-loop” machine learning model was able to create a new job of “affordable stylist” by analyzing large datasets of customer preferences and enabling a stylist to pick suitable wardrobe items more efficiently, said Lake, who remains chair of Stitch Fix’s board.
Recruit’s rich data could drive better outcomes for job seekers and companies as artificial intelligence plays a greater role in the company’s ambition to cut the time that it takes to hire someone by half, according to Lake.
It wasn’t just the similarities between Recruit and Stitch Fix that led Lake to accept the offer to join as one of eight directors.
With an average age of 54, Recruit’s board is the youngest among the top 25 companies in the Nikkei 225, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The average age of directors within that group is 64.
Hisayuki Idekoba, Recruit’s chief executive officer, was the youngest CEO in the Nikkei 225 when he took over in April 2021. Chief Operating Officer Ayano Senaha is the same age as Lake and joined the board in 2020 when she was in her thirties.
Lake’s participation also brings Recruit’s percentage of women board directors to 38%, a stark contrast with the rest of corporate Japan, which struggles with board diversity. With female representation of just 15% in the Nikkei 225, Japanese companies lag far behind enterprises in the US, Europe and Hong Kong, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Lake was also nudged toward taking a board seat at a Japanese company by another factor: her mother hails from the country. Although Lake grew up outside of the island nation, she’s an enthusiast of many things Japanese, including takoyaki, the fried octopus dish. The mother of three boys said she’s looking forward to connecting with her heritage.
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