The sixth floor of 124-127 St Stephen’s Green, a swish Dublin office block, used to house the offices of bankers who brought 100% mortgages to Ireland; then it was occupied by a debt collection company involved in mopping up the mess. Now, with the economy on the rise, it’s the canteen for Indeed, an online recruiter that came to Ireland four years ago and already employs more than 400 staff here.
Indeed moved in before Christmas and has given the place the hallmarks of web companies the world over. Staff in T-shirts and hoodies eat free food at communal tables, under ceilings with exposed wiring and pipework.
In a glass-walled boardroom, Indeed’s 24-member global leadership team is having its quarterly chin-wag, led by president Chris Hyams and chief executive Hisayuki Idekoba, or Deko for short. Meeting over, Hyams settles into Moe’s Tavern, a tiny glass meeting room with an overflowing box of GoPro cameras ditched in one corner.
It is Hyams’s fifth time in Ireland, and he seems genuinely enthused. “Opening this office was probably the best decision we made as a company, as we expand,” he says. “Dublin set a stake in the ground for us.”
Though not a household name, Indeed is the world’s most-used jobs site, with 180m unique visitors a month from 50 countries, browsing 18m jobs. It pulls in job vacancies from all sorts of sources and presents them on a simple site with two search boxes: “what” (job) and “where”.
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Hyams, an easy-going son of a Hollywood director, is an evangelist. “The company’s whole existence is to help people get jobs,” he says. “Having a job is one of the top things that matters to people, after their family and their health.” He says this often and emphatically enough to convince listeners he means it.
Indeed’s real claim to fame is that it may well be the original unicorn. Founded in 2004, it raised $5m (€4.4m) in funding and was bought in 2012 by the Japanese group Recruit Holdings for $1bn.
The same year, it set up in Ireland. Almost a sixth of Indeed’s 2,600 staff are now in Dublin, and the plan is to have 600 here in two years.
Hyams claims the availability of talent and quality of life helped Ireland see off Switzerland to host the office. “Both have very attractive tax regimes, and in fact Switzerland was perhaps more favourable,” he says. “Switzerland is great, it’s beautiful, but it’s pretty difficult to get other people to move there.”
A large number of the Irish staff work in client support and sales, though the company also has group finance roles and its global head of marketing in Dublin. The city “will certainly be on the list” as it expands its software engineering beyond the US and Japan, says Hyams.
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Software development is close to his heart, though he was a latecomer to the tech party. His background, rather, is entertainment industry royalty. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Sol Hurok, was a Russian Jewish impresario who brought the Bolshoi ballet to the US. His father, Peter Hyams, was a jazz drummer and painter who became a CBS News anchorman aged 21.
Hyams Sr then hit the big time as a film director, with credits including 2010, The Presidio, Timecop, End of Days and Capricorn One. The young Hyams had a part in the latter, a 1977 thriller about a faked mission to Mars, as the son of actor James Brolin’s astronaut character.
At 12 or 13, he was regularly accompanying his father to film sets and working behind the scenes. Hyams saw his future in films — until he landed an internship at a production company, where he realised it was all about making money, not art.
“I was very disillusioned. So, very precociously, I quit the business at age 20.”
A “math and science geek” at high school in Los Angeles, he signed up for engineering at Princeton but quickly swapped into architecture, which he thoroughly enjoyed. “I lacked one important factor, which was talent,” he says.
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“It was a fine intellectual pursuit but it was pretty clear it was not going to be a career.”
He met his future wife Lize, a New Yorker, at Princeton, and they moved after graduation to Woodstock, Vermont, home to picturesque covered bridges and a harvest fair. “It was about as far from big city life as was possible. There are more cows than people.”
Lize worked as a librarian and Hyams taught emotionally disturbed children at the local high school. “It was very rewarding but very challenging. There were nine kids; one ran away, one got arrested and one killed himself.”
After two years, they moved back to Los Angeles, where he played as a drummer in bands while Lize went to UCLA. “From age 24-26, I played drums every night and spent eight hours a day practising.”
When Lize got a job at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Hyams gained the perk of studying at Rice for free. He considered a course in music but was put off by a “not very encouraging” chair of the music department.
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The chair of the computer science course was the opposite. “He said, ‘Computer science is the coolest thing in the world’,” says Hyams.
He did not need much encouraging. He had done some basic programming in high school and had an email address in the early 1990s through the Well, a San Francisco online community.
He was also deeply influenced by a book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, a US professor of cognitive science. Hyams goes off on an enthusiastic description of its exploration of common themes in the lives and works of the logician Kurt Gödel, the artist MC Escher and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. He could be speaking another language.
Suffice to say Hofstadter’s book is described as “a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”, and won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction . A month into the computer science course, Hyams “couldn’t imagine doing anything else”. He studied in 1993-95 — a pivotal time for the tech sector, when the first web browsers were coming on stream and the Java programming language was released. “The summer before I finished, amazon.com launched,” he says.
Few people had any sense of where it was all going. “It was way before it was cool or lucrative,” he says. “There was just a geeky academic thing that drew us all in.”
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He started in 1996 as a software engineer at Trilogy in Austin, Texas, which did big IT implementations, including a late-1990s system that allowed Ford buyers to customise their cars online. At the back end, Ford gathered customer data.
Hyams was Trilogy’s outstanding developer of the year in 1999; by 2000, he was vice president of development, with responsibility for 300 staff. It went against his nature.
“I had read enough Dilbert to be suspicious of anything to do with management,” he says. “I wanted to be the world’s best programmer, but I realised at age 30 that I’m never the best at anything. What I am good at is being able to take things that are complicated and explain them in simple ways.”
He left Trilogy at the end of 2004, after reading Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s book about a baseball team that used analytics to improve on-field performance. “There’s no better business book that’s not a book about business. I read it and quit my job.”
The next venture was his own, B-Side Entertainment, which combined his film interests and tech ability. It aimed to use analytics to find and promote “hidden gems” from the thousands of films made each year. “The things studios spend money on are not necessarily the best films,” says Hyams.
B-Side ran websites and bookings for more than 200 film festivals, gathering audience feedback and reviews, and also moved into film distribution. The company raised $8m investment and had 16 staff but ran out of cash in 2010.
“You learn a lot on the way down, when it’s falling apart — primarily about your responsibility to employees and shareholders,” says Hyams. “It also made me a far better employee than I would ever have been.”
He did six months at Slated, which acquired B-Side’s intellectual property, and was back on the jobs market in late 2010. A neighbour who worked at Indeed introduced him to Rony Kahan, who co-founded the company and ran its product operations. They hit it off.
“I could choose where I wanted to work,” says Hyams, the sole reference to his personal circumstances. “I knew nothing about Indeed but I was attracted to the mission of the company. They had a genuine humility. I have spent time with a lot of tech founders, and humility is not top of the list.”
He joined Indeed as senior vice president of product and engineering— a grand title at a company that had about 150 staff. “Indeed started at the same time as B-Side, but our trajectories have been very different,” he says, smiling.
Indeed had raised $5m from Union Square Ventures, Allen & Co and the New York Times Company, and was already profitable. “I dug under the hood and saw what had been achieved,” says Hyams. “It had clearly limitless potential.”
Within two years, Indeed had 550 staff, 80m monthly unique visitors and revenues of $150m. “I think the technical term is ‘rocket ship’.”
The company was considering an IPO when Recruit snapped it up in September 2012, generating huge windfalls for Kahan and co-founder Paul Forster. The New York Times made a $100m profit on its investment.
Hyams, a shareholder at the time of the deal, is full of praise for Recruit, which has annual revenues of $12bn and employs 32,000 people across 162 subsidiaries: “It’s a 57-year-old company. They think about the long term, not the next quarter. They have been the greatest benevolent parent.”
Indeed has repaid its generosity, delivering revenues of $472m in the nine months to the end of 2015, up 83% year on year. About half the job searches are on mobile devices, a growing trend.
Last October, Hyams was promoted to president. “I never look for the next role or sought promotion. I care about being of use, and I guess my ideas are no worse than anyone else’s.”
He brushes off competition from the likes of LinkedIn, Monster and Stepstone. “What keeps me awake at night is all the people not finding jobs online,” he says. “What we do is truly of use.”
It seems safe to say he will not be jumping ship to any old unicorn. “Clean water is something I might do some day,” he says, after some thought.
“But social justice starts with economic opportunity, you know?” Indeed.
The life of Chris Hyams
Vital statistics
Age: 48
Home: Austin, Texas
Family: Wife Lize, daughters Emma, 20, and Mazie, 18
Education: AB in architecture history and theory, Princeton university; and master of computer science, Rice university
Favourite book: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
Favourite film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Working day
One day a week I focus on our products, meeting our product teams to discuss what they did last week, what tests we’ve run and what we’ve learnt. Other days, I’ll spend time with our sales and client services leaders. With our rapid growth I spend a lot of time recruiting. I travel quite a bit to our global offices and spend time with clients around the world.
Downtime
With both kids off to college, my wife and I travel more. In October, Lize joined me on a trip to Tokyo. Last summer, we came to Ireland for a driving tour along the Wild Atlantic Way to Galway, Sligo, up to Northern Ireland and back down to Dublin. I love music and movies. I take every opportunity to see bands, and I am a board member at the Austin Film Festival. Travelling to Indeed offices gives me the opportunity to eat great food around the world. My favourite restaurant in Dublin is the Winding Stair — I would fly back just for their smoked fish plate.
