Starting at the bottom rung and rising to the top in one of the UK’s most prominent recruiters is a dream common to many recruitment consultants. But for most it remains just that - a dream.

But Tim Cook, who started off as a trainee with Montrose (then part of Hays) in 1987 and who was appointed managing director of Hays UK & Ireland last October, is living proof that sometimes dreams do come true.

It’s the culmination of an ambition that Cook himself always held, but perhaps until later in his career never really believed possible. “Did I think I would be running the place? No. Did I want to? Yes,” he says.

However, as Cook sits behind his desk at Hays’ office, not far from Buckingham Palace, the responsibilities appear to rest lightly on his shoulders. “You are in the posh part of town now,” he announces jovially, as he sips his Earl Grey tea. And during the conversation the sound of laughter is never far from breaking out.

That said, Cook clearly did not get to where he is today by taking the attitude that business life is always a bundle of laughs. “I can introduce the changes that are needed into the business much more swiftly than perhaps I could have if the business had been running like a train,” he says, clearly keen to turn the downturn which has hit Hays hard into an opportunity. “There is a difference between a car crash, and a controlled car crash, isn’t there?” he adds.

Cook has already shown himself ready to take tough decisions, cutting Hays’ staff by 9% in the first quarter of 2009 and shutting 14 offices as net fees plummeted by 37% compared to 12 months previously.

At the same time, Cook is focused on looking beyond the current economic difficulties, and taking a more strategic three to five-year view of the state of the recruitment industry, and where Hays should be positioned.

“Recruitment is right on the edge of a massive change curve, and what worked before won’t necessarily work later,” he says.
Cook is particularly exercised with the impact of the web on recruitment - a topic which, he says, he has studied closely. Referring to it as “disruptive innovation” - a term he picked up during a course he attended at the London Business School in 2008 - Cook says the web is challenging the business models of a lot of recruitment consultancies.

Cook has identified job boards as a major threat, with increasing numbers of clients and candidates changing their behaviour and going on online “at a rate of knots”. The line between agencies and recruiters is even in danger of becoming blurred, he suggests, with some recruiters using job boards as their first source of candidates.

A letter from Monster to its customers in February informing them it could do the same job as a recruitment consultancy only cheaper is also a clear indication of where the battle ground for recruiters increasingly lies, he believes.

However, Cook is equally clear that the growth of job boards, and the “disarray” of Hays’ competitors, provides the company with the ideal opportunity to take advantage of its USP (unique selling proposition) - its ability to specialise across a range of sectors, such as finance, construction & property, and IT.

It’s a model that has served Hays well over many years, says Cook, adding: “I have never met a hiring manger who wouldn’t prefer to deal with a specialist recruiter, nor a candidate who wanted to register with a generalist recruiter, unless they are unskilled.

“I don’t believe that homogeneous recruitment businesses have a great future,” adds Cook, explaining that this was one reason the company dropped its internal rebrand using the strapline ‘One Hays’. “The ‘One Hays’ tag implies it’s a homogeneous business,” he says. It has now been replaced by ‘Hays stronger together’. This emphasises “it’s the specialism that adds the value”, he says, albeit with common “slick recruitment processes” such as IT underpinning each of those specialisms.

Cook argues that given that both hiring managers and candidates prefer to deal with specialists, the question for Hays is why its individual businesses should be part of a group. “The only reason you would do that would be to leverage your own scale to be able to build processes that are common across all your businesses or to cross sell between them,” he says, answering his own question.

“What Hays is delivering and will continue to deliver is boutique expert functions with a corporate hat thrown over them, and therein lies the unique proposition that is Hays,” he says. This also fits in nicely with the desire of corporates to deal with a one-stop shop, he argues.

The issue then becomes how to make Hays more efficient. Cook says that Hays is already working on this, with a major plank being to spend £40m on its IT infrastructure, and the introduction of new technology to improve its consultants’ search capability. It also plans to move from 60 separate databases to just one database across the company.

“As a specialist you should know who is available, when and where, the minute the job is phoned in or canvassed. People will pay for unique current and relevant data, which really means knowledge,” he says.

Cook says the winners and losers will be decided by who manages data better, with, in his view, specialists coming out on top. “If we knew where every C++ programmer is and where and when they are finishing, why would anyone need a job board?” he asks.

Cook believes the big prize for Hays will be delivering to large employers, both corporates and the public sector, where the breadth and depth of what Hays can offer “all the specialisms joined together” will be a big asset. Another key area will be RPOs (recruitment process outsourcers) with heavyweights such as Capita and Serco looking to make further advances into this market.

Cook is aware that in today’s fast-moving world, the sheer size of Hays could put it at a disadvantage when compared with its smaller, more fleet-footed rivals. “The danger is that the corporate isn’t very agile,” he says. And so while Cook says Hays is already “very entrepreneurial”, he recognises the importance of developing this further by building what he calls “the entrepreneurial corporate”.

Cook says that if employees in the company come to him with ideas to develop the business into another specialism, he will always support them, as long as they have a good business plan, and match up to Hays’ values of honesty and passion. “I see no tension in being an entrepreneur in a corporate environment as long as the ground rules are clear,” he says. “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t an entrepreneur,” he adds.

Cook is sanguine about the threats by generalist recruiters to Hays’ market position. “Everyone wants to be in my space, but I am already in my space,” he says defiantly, clearly bolstered by the difficulties experienced by Adecco in trying to acquire Michael Page last year. Hays holds the high ground and is ready to repulse any attackers, he says.

Cook is also undismayed by the threat to Hays’ growth as public sector budgets come under pressure, declaring that Hays is taking marketshare. He says Hays has “exotic plans in health and education to grow those businesses aggressively”.

Clearly a Hays man through and through, with a deep and abiding respect for the company, which he describes as “one of the great dames of the recruitment industry”, Cook is aware of the weight of responsibility on his shoulders “in stewarding the company through what is turning out to be a tough time”. And he admits that among the feelings of delight and excitement at getting the top job, he was also “a little bit frightened”.
Similarly he admits that taking the knife to a business, which he helped build, “pulls on the heart strings”. However, he is clear that such decisions are absolutely necessary. “We need to make sure we are in the best shape to bounce back, frankly,” he says, adding, “I am not in the business of running loss-making businesses.”

And while he says spending his career in one company helps him to get things done because he understands the business so well, he admits that he spends “a lot of time finding out what I don’t know.” He adds: “This is not a lifestyle business, this is a proper business,” referring to the 60-70 hours he and his management team put in each week. So it comes as no surprise that he has no qualms about announcing Hays’ ambition “to dominate the recruitment environment”.

It all seems a long way from 1987 when he joined Montrose as an interviewer because “I needed a job” and because it paid a guaranteed £5,000 pa. Since then Cook has enjoyed a seemingly inexorable rise through the ranks, something he attributes to his love of talking to people, his passion, and his hard work. “I was fortunate enough to fall into a career that suits my personality,” he adds modestly.
Be that as it may, Cook is proof that in recruitment it really is possible to live the dream.

Tim Cook: a snapshot

Home town London
Education Dulwich College - A-levels
2008 London Business School, Senior Executive programme
1987 Joined Montrose, which became part of Hays, as a trainee in its construction business
1990-2005 Various managerial/director roles in Hays Construction & Property in Republic of Ireland, Yorkshire, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Including setting up businesses from scratch
2005 Deputy managing director, Hays Construction & Property
2006 Managing director, Hays Construction & Property
2008 Managing director, Hays UK & Ireland