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Helping the Unemployed Find Work and Self-Esteem
In the late 1990s, when the UK recruitment firm started in 1960 by his father, Sir Alec Reed, won a government contract to provide welfare-to-work employment services, James Reed (MBA 1990) knew success would require some innovative thinking.
“Our strength was placing highly skilled, motivated professionals into finance or technology positions,” he says. “Working with unskilled, long-term unemployed clients was something new.”
Reed, who today leads Reed Executive, Ltd., recalls the enthusiasm of staffers in the firm’s first office in Hackney, one of East London’s most economically challenged neighborhoods. “A chap once came in and told us he had nothing presentable to wear to an interview that afternoon,” Reed relates. “So one of our guys just took off his own suit and gave it to him!” On Friday afternoons, the staff would go outside and set off fireworks—one rocket for each person who found work that week. “It was something the whole community could celebrate.”
Since those early days in Hackney, Reed in Partnership, the welfare-to-work arm of the global Reed parent company, has placed more than 140,000 people into sustainable jobs across the UK and added programs such as apprenticeships, college job brokerage, and National Citizen Service for 16- and 17-year-olds.
“Often it’s just bad luck that places people in poverty,” Reed notes. “If you’ve been lucky in life, as I certainly have, it’s important to do what you can to even that up a bit.”
(Published August 2015)
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