Yahoo! Rikunabi

» see rikunabi.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Yahoo Japan had been running its own recruitment section, Yahoo! Kyujin Joho, as a listings product with no particular advantage over anybody else's. In April 2004 it stopped trying. Yahoo signed a comprehensive partnership with Recruit covering the whole employment category, consolidated its sourcing down to Recruit alone, and relaunched the section as Yahoo! Rikunabi. From that point the biggest portal in Japan was a storefront for the biggest recruitment company in Japan, and the arrangement had one name on the door for both of them.

What sat under the brand was most of Recruit's catalog. Rikunabi NEXT for people changing careers, Recruit Agent for matching, Entre-net for anyone going independent, From A Navi and Rikunabi Haken and Toraba-yu and Hataraiku on the part-time and temp side, all reachable from a rikunabi.yahoo.co.jp address. Several of them shipped mobile versions for Japanese feature phones, which in 2006 was where the job searching actually happened. Two more, Shotworks for short-term work and Shiftworks for hunting by which days you were free, came from Indival, a company Yahoo and Recruit set up together and Yahoo later absorbed.

The partnership ended in stages rather than at once, and the announcement of the last stage came through a notice page on Rikunabi NEXT rather than a press release. On 18 December 2012 everything except Shotworks and Shiftworks came off the Yahoo address, went back to the plain Rikunabi brand, and changed URL. Eight and a half years of accumulated links pointed at nothing in particular after that.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it came apart ~

The break started three years early and it started with the part of the business Recruit cared about most. Rikunabi for new graduates is an institution in Japan, the site an entire graduating cohort registers with in the autumn before they finish, and it left Yahoo with the Rikunabi 2011 edition that opened in October 2009. From then on new-graduate hiring was Recruit's alone.

Yahoo responded by opening Yahoo! Shushoku Katsudo and carrying listings from en-japan as well as Recruit, so the exclusivity was already broken from both directions well before the end. By the time the 2012 closure came around, the thing being switched off was a co-branded shell around products that Recruit had spent three years reclaiming. Nobody lost a service on 18 December. They lost a hostname.

~ what the deal was worth ~

For eight years, anyone in Japan who started a job search from a portal home page started it inside Recruit's inventory without necessarily knowing that. That is the whole value of the arrangement, and it is also why it could not last: a distribution deal that good eventually makes the supplier wonder what it is paying the distributor for. Recruit answered that question in 2009 with the graduates, and finished answering it in 2012 with everything else.

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