About

Driving an effective privacy compliance programme and culture at Indeed, as well as helping to facilitate Indeed’s rapid Irish and global expansion in terms of product development, revenue and headcount growth Killian Kehoe is an excellent in-house lawyer thriving in his role as senior group counsel at Indeed. The company has secured a strong brand in Ireland’s legal sector since setting up its Irish office in 2012, which has been driven to a great extent by Kehoe. He says that, ‘to date my career has been principally focused on European law and policy-making, which very much carries into my current role with Indeed. The first step in my career was with the leading Irish law firm A&L Goodbody, where I trained and qualified as a solicitor’. This was followed by a stint as a policy analyst with the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, and then a move to Brussels to work as a trainee in the Directorate-General for Competition in the European Commission in Brussels. Kehoe then worked with the international consultancy Hill & Knowlton for a short period before moving to work for five years with the international law firm O’Melveny in its Brussels office, advising a wide range of international clients on competition, European regulatory and data protection matters. He adds that, ‘it was from this role that I got the opportunity to work for the number one jobsite in the world, Indeed, in its EMEA headquarters in Dublin. I was the company’s first lawyer outside of the US, and joined an excellent legal analyst in the Dublin office’. The legal team in Dublin has since grown to 11, including lawyers and analysts. This reflects wider growth at Indeed’s Dublin office from 400 when he started to just over 1,100 employees today, as well as equivalent growth in Indeed’s other offices across EMEA and Asia Pacific, which Kehoe support and advise on a day-to-day basis. In terms of transactions, it has been an eventful few years at Indeed. The largest of these was the US$1.2bn acquisition of Glassdoor in 2018, but there have been a number of smaller and strategically important international deals, the most recent of which is the purchase of Syft in the UK. Kehoe highlights that, ‘most of my work in this respect has been on the due diligence side, as well as on the integrations side post-completion. That work is all about helping those businesses with compliance issues that may arise as they scale, and putting in place business-friendly processes to allow both Indeed and our new affiliates leverage each other to develop better products for our customers’. Highly nominated for this award, Kehoe is a highly respected in-house lawyer within the Irish market and globally. A nominator identifies that, ‘while working with Kehoe on transactions, we have experienced first-hand his application of technical and interpersonal skills to successfully complete fast-paced M&A projects while working with various internal business leaders as well as outside counsel across multiple jurisdictions. He is also an excellent team player and communicator, and we have seen him successfully interact and collaborate with colleagues internally on critical projects. We have also witnessed his ability to identify and assess legal risks on a daily basis in order to make informed and well-reasoned decisions that have, in our view, undoubtedly contributed to the growth of the Indeed business in the EMEA region in a meaningful way’.