CEO Today UK Awards 2021

55 CEO TODAY UNITED KINGDOM AWARDS 2021 Recruitment Cox CEO of Hayes plc Firm Profile We are Hays, the leading global experts in qualified, professional and skilled recruitment. The c.10,400 people we employ around the world partner with clients and candidates to power the world of work. Every day, across our business, we benefit society by helping people succeed and enabling organisations to thrive – creating opportunities and improving lives. Having a balanced exposure within and between our markets is key to driving performance, particularly in challenging economic times. It also delivers better results. Our business has scale, breadth and diversity of exposure. It is purposely built to take into account the megatrends driving change in our industry, and also to best withstand turbulent economic times. As part of our ‘return to growth’ initiatives, we are investing to grow our presence and take market share in areas such as IT, large Corporate Accounts and Life Sciences. We have deliberately and strategically built a business which is balanced and diverse. Within our network, we have exposure to both more cyclical, mature markets such as the UK and less mature, structural growth markets such as Germany and in Asia. We have deep scale and expertise in 20 specialist areas of skilled employment. We are predominantly Private sector focused, but also serve Public sector clients in some markets. Within our portfolio of services, we work on one-off placements for SMEs and global multinationals, as well as contract-based, higher-volume recruitment for our larger clients. The balance, breadth and scale of our business is unique in the world of specialist recruitment. This is a key differentiator, which we believe is important as it makes our business and its earnings relatively more resilient to today’s ever-changing macroeconomic and political landscapes. Alistair About Alistair Cox Alistair has been the CEO of Hays, plc since Sept. 2007. An aeronautical engineer by training (University of Salford, UK, 1982), Alistair commenced his career at British Aerospace in the military aircraft division. From 1983-1988, he worked Schlumberger filling a number of field and research roles in the Oil & Gas Industry in both Europe and North America. He completed his MBA (Stanford University, California) in 1991 and returned to the UK as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. He moved to Blue Circle Industries in 1994 as Group Strategy Director, responsible for all aspects of strategic planning and international investments for the group. In 2002, Alistair returned to the UK as CEO of Xansa, a UK based IT services and back-office processing organisation. During his 5 year tenure at Xansa, he re-focused the organisation to create a UK leading provider of back-office services across both the Public and Private sector and built one of the strongest offshore operations in the sector with over 6,000 people based in India. www.social .hays.com