Illegal involvement in a price-fixing arrangement in 2005 led specialist recruiter Hays to strengthen its internal emphasis on compliance and legal awareness, the firm’s chief executive has told Recruiter.

Each staff member is required each year to undergo a bespoke training programme on competition law compliance and take a test on the content, Alistair Cox said in an interview. The training programme, developed in conjunction with Hays’ legal representatives at Freshfields learning specialists Interactive Dialogue, is now in its third year.

Cox also reiterated the fact that the Board of Hays took the findings extremely seriously and had co-operated fully with the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in all aspects of its investigation.

“We have an extremely strong compliance culture and I will open the door to anybody to come and look at what we do and how we do it,” Cox said. “I actually think as an industry there were some lessons learned back then in terms of benchmarking the industry’s ability to comply to the levels we must comply with.”

We are not guilty of financially disadvantaging anybody in the marketplace and I think that is a point that really needs to be reiterated ALISTAIR COX, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, HAYS

Hays is appealing a £30.4m fine levied by the OFT for its involvement in the cartel, in which seven other recruitment firms also participated in 2004-05. Six companies were fined and one received immunity for whistle-blowing.

While the price fixing predated Cox joining Hays, he acknowledges wrongdoing on the company’s part. He has, however, questioned the OFT’s decision to “put us in the same sort of category of seriousness” as the British Airways/Virgin Atlantic price-rigging affair in which 8m consumers were cheated in a fuel surcharge scam.

“We are not guilty of financially disadvantaging anybody in the marketplace and I think that is a point that really needs to be reiterated,” Cox said. “In no shape or form did this have any semblance to any of the other high-profile cases over the last few years where people have been financially disadvantaged in a quite systematic fashion over a long period of time.”

The £30.4m fine reflected more than double the profit earned by Hays’ construction and property division in the year the division was involved in the cartel, Cox said. “We have been penalised on group-wide turnover,” he added. “The OFT has got the responsibility to punish and deter [but] I don’t believe as a company we needed any further deterrence from this, given the way we have acted since it came to management’s attention.”