The scooter-loving chairman of Reed is riding high – and doesn’t expect the UK’s worker shortage to ease any time soon
James Reed has zipped into the London head office of the jobs website that bears his family name on a bright blue Vespa scooter modishly emblazoned with his initials. In the midst of the worst worker shortage Britain has seen for decades, the chairman of Reed – one of the UK’s biggest recruitment websites, used by more than 11 million people a month – is the busiest he has been in the quarter-century he’s been at its helm.
It’s a far cry from last year, when the company – started by his father, Sir Alec Reed, six decades ago – was in crisis, with turnover plunging as the global jobs market crashed. “It’s unlike anything I’ve seen. We had a jobs bust last year; now it’s a jobs boom,” he says in his office in Holborn, central London. “It’s the most interesting period I’ve experienced in my career, and in many ways the most challenging. There’s a huge demand for workers and a great shortage of supply.”
