Soon after the British recruitment agency Reed launched its first website from an internet café called Cyberia in the 1990s, a news article said: “James Reed thinks in the future people will be sending their CVs by email,” the son of the company’s founder recalls.
Thirty years on, James Reed, now chief executive, is once again scrambling to make sense of new technology, this time as artificial intelligence begins to upend the labour market. “2025 does feel quite like 1995,” he says.
The agency, started in 1960 by Reed’s father Alec as one Hounslow store, is now among the UK’s largest and most recognisable jobs companies, with annual revenue of more than ￡1bn. Its website is used by 85 per cent of the UK’s top recruitment firms, and it also runs bricks-and-mortar jobs agencies, provides temporary workers and specialised hiring services in sectors such as graduate jobs and healthcare, and runs workplace learning programmes.