James Reed (businessman)

Reed was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to business and charity. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (FCIPD).

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Big Give raised over £3.67m for the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. In the same year, The Big Give raised £1.8m for women & girls charities.

In January 2022 Reed signed the Armed Forces Covenant on behalf of Reed Recruitment, in support of current and former service personnel in their transition away from the military.

Reed predicted a 'tsunami of employment losses' in 2020 COVID-19, but afterwards became bullish on the UK economy. In 2022, he expected that a shift in power toward employees and hybrid working would endure "...for this business cycle at least." He supports remote work.

Published in January 2020, Life's Work is aimed at those about to choose or switch career. Reed argues that successful careers are built on ambition, positivity, self-knowledge and self-discipline. Successful executives tend to be sociable and gregarious - but also “sustainably selfish”, establishing personal boundaries to protect against burnout. Reed also emphasises the importance of working in high-growth sectors, where personal progress is propelled by structural change - a phenomenon Reed likens to Poohsticks.

In a 2020 interview with Management Today, Reed described Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends And Influence People as the business book that "...resonated most with me".

In June 2019 Reed published The Happy Recruiter, a short book offering career advice for professional recruiters.

In 2019 Reed was voted top recruitment CEO on Glassdoor's Employees' Choice awards, and 20th CEO across all industries. In the same year he was named in the Europe Staffing 100 list of recruitment professionals, published by Staffing Industry Analysis. In 2020 CEO Today magazine named Reed in its list of notable CEOs. In 2021 the TIARA Recruitment Awards added Reed to the Saffery Champness Hall of Fame, for his contribution to the recruitment industry.

Co-authored by Reed and Harvard lecturer Paul G. Stoltz, Put Your Mindset to Work was published by Portfolio Penguin in May 2011. The book highlights the importance of an employee's mindset, observing that 97% of employers value mindset over skill. The book identifies three elements of a desirable mindset, namely Global, Good and Grit. A Global executive sets their actions and decisions in a global context; a Good executive is sensitive to others and seeks to do good; an executive with Grit is tenacious in the workplace.

The title entered the USA Today best-seller list in June 2011. It won a CMI Management Book of the Year Award, in the Commuters' Read category. A second edition was published in August 2013, with endorsements from Timpson CEO James Timpson, Gordon Roddick and management author Jim Kouzes.

Reed frequently acknowledges that his appointment to the family business was based partly on nepotism, telling The Guardian in 2010 that "...there is no other way to describe it.” Reed's father is quoted as believing that family-run businesses "...cut out a lot of company politics".

Between 2008 and 2018, Reed appeared in a series of TV commercials starring the actor and comedian Rufus Jones. Jones plays Reed as a caricature of a superhero who transforms job seekers into their ideal role. In one advert Reed makes a cameo appearance as an ice-cream seller who is then transformed into a nightclub DJ. The adverts have received more than 28 million YouTube views. Some adverts have been directed by the previous year's winners of Reed's annual Short Film Competition.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Reed re-launched the Keep Britain Working campaign following its initial launch in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Alongside Lord Sugar, Lord Bamford, Luke Johnson, James Timpson and others, Reed called upon CEOs to protect jobs by sacrificing management salaries and company profit. During the campaign Reed declined his salary from the family business. He also donated £100,000 from personal funds to the National Emergencies Trust (NET), which was matched by a £100,000 donation from the Reed Foundation via The Big Give, whose campaign for NET raised £1.36m in total.

The Big Give was founded by Reed's father Sir Alec Reed in 2007; it is now chaired by James and has helped to raise over £233m for UK-registered charities.

As chief executive, Reed delisted Reed Executive from the UK Stock Exchange in 2003, buying back the company for 140p per share and a valuation of £62.6m. Some financial commentators claimed the Reed family took advantage of a lull in the firm's share price following a cyclical slump and the controversy around the spin-off of Reed Health. Reed launched a hostile takeover of Reed Health two years later, bringing the company back under the family's control. According to Reed, the firm was delisted because it no longer required outside capital; Reed's father suggested in his autobiography that the de-listing was caused in part by the publication of the Higgs and Cadbury reports, which called for greater restrictions on public company governance.

Reed has also spoken of being "horrified" when a young member of staff suggested that the website should offer vacancies advertised by rival recruitment firms. Reed would go on to approve the experiment; the scheme began in May 2000 and by November of the same year over 2000 rival firms had registered on the site. Reed would go on to credit the idea as being the foundation of the firm's online strategy. The junior employee earned a £100,000 bonus for his suggestion.

In 1997 Reed was invited to bid on contracts issued by the Blair administration, in which some of the traditional work of Job Centres was outsourced to the private sector. This resulted in Reed in Partnership, which now employs 900 people and has expanded into Europe and Australia.

reed.co.uk was the first recruitment website offered by a recruitment agency in the UK. It launched in 1995 with 40 vacancies. It now hosts over 3.3 million jobs per year. The company's first website was suggested and built by a young IT contractor nicknamed "Pancake the Clown", after the contractor's sideline business as a children's entertainer. Reed later said: "The truth of the matter is, I got Pancake the Clown to build our first prototype."

Reed became operations director at Reed Group in April 1994 and chief executive in 1997; Reed's father gave him a baton to symbolise the handover of power. The baton now hangs on the wall of Reed's personal office. He succeeded his father to the position of Chairman in 2004.

He became a non-executive director of Reed in 1992. In a 2014 radio interview, he spoke of the background to joining the family business full-time:

Reed joined the BBC in 1990, after graduating from Harvard. He produced documentaries for BBC TV on topics such as Tom Peters and prison privatisation. After the Tom Peters documentary grossed £1m, Reed requested funding for a similar programme but was denied, prompting him to leave the BBC.

From 1987 to 1988 he coordinated relief and development programmes in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, on behalf of Help the Aged and Afghanaid. He coordinated fundraising, publicity, and sponsorship for Afghanaid and covered the Afghan conflict for The Independent newspaper. He entered Afghanistan disguised as an Afghan travelling with Mujahideen rebels.

Reed attended Scaitcliffe prep school and St Paul's. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1984 with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and subsequently gained an MBA from Harvard Business School. At Oxford, Reed was political editor of Samizdat, a magazine for political science students. At Harvard he produced In The Shadow of The City, a case study and video about slum improvement works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

He graduated from Oxford in 1984, seeking to work for an entrepreneur. He sent a speculative job application to Gordon and Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, working in the firm's stores in Brighton and Great Marlborough Street, London. The Roddicks then hired him as Gordon's assistant. Reed then worked for Saatchi & Saatchi between 1985–1986, where he managed advertising campaigns for British Rail, Club 18-30, Eurotunnel and Procter and Gamble.

James Andrew Reed CBE, FCIPD (born April 1963) is a British businessman. He is chairman and chief executive of the Reed group of companies. He is the son of Sir Alec Reed, who founded the company in 1960. He is chairman of The Big Give Trust, a match-funding charity supported in part by the Reed Foundation and the Reed family. The Big Give has raised over £233m for UK-registered charities.