Who is behind this
Why James knows the other end
He has no qualification in employment law, HR or organisational change, and this site gives no advice in any of those. His knowledge of this subject comes from one narrow place, and it is worth being precise about what it is.
Twenty years of the calls afterwards
James Roberts, born in Manchester in 1976, spent nearly twenty years as a headhunter in airline, hospitality and travel recruitment, latterly running a firm of twenty people. Those are cyclical industries: fuel, currency, a season that does not arrive, a route that closes. Redundancy comes in waves rather than one at a time.
Which meant that a large part of the job was ringing people who had just lost jobs. Sometimes the week it happened, sometimes six months later. The conversation almost always began with what happened at your last place.
Nobody in those calls had any reason to be diplomatic about it. He was not their employer and had no stake in defending the company that had done it to them. So what he heard was the unvarnished version, hundreds of times, across dozens of companies and several countries.
That is the whole of his authority here: he knows what the man on the receiving end says about it afterwards. He has never sat on the deciding side of a mass redundancy himself, and this site does not pretend otherwise.
Who you are talking to
I have been in a lot of rooms.
Most of them with other men. Some of them very ordinary, a few of them not ordinary at all. Every one of them taught me how to listen.
- 01
Thousands of men
Nearly twenty years of recruiting, all over the world. Men at the top of their game, men on the way out, and every one in between.
- 02
Unusual housemates
I have shared a home with a man who had done time, and with a journalist who wrote for the Daily Sport and the News of the World. Neither was dull.
- 03
Famous company
I have spent time with a Premier League footballer and a pop star. Same questions, same worries, better shoes.
- 04
Half the planet
I have navigated half the world and never once been punched. Polite and cheeky, in that order.
- 05
Any room, same man
As happy in a trailer as on a stag do. I have seen in the New Year with a prince, and another with a sheikh.
- 06
Other men’s stories
I take inspiration from other people and live a little through them, in a happy and healthy way. Then I make my own judgement.
I can sit with any man, in any room, and be myself. That is what I bring to the conversation.
James Roberts, Tenerife
What he is not
Not an employment lawyer, not an HR practitioner, not a consultant, not an outplacement provider, not a therapist or counsellor.
He does not know your consultation obligations, your notice requirements, your selection criteria or your exposure to claims, in the United Kingdom, Spain or anywhere else, and this site will not guess at them. Those are for a qualified adviser, and the cost of getting them wrong is real.
The rest of it
He drank daily from eighteen to forty-five and has been sober since 20 June 2020, after four weeks at Delamere in Cheshire. In December 2020 he moved, alone, to Icod de los Vinos in the north of Tenerife, and ran a bed and breakfast there for five years, learning the basics on his own as he went. It has since been sold.
That is here because it is the reason the network exists at all, rather than because it has anything to do with redundancy. He built these guides for subjects men sit on alone, having spent twenty-seven years sitting on one.
This one exists because the man making the decisions is the only person in the building nobody thinks to ask about.
The network
This guide is one of a set. Each one covers a single subject and none of them explains another one's. The whole network is listed at the bottom of every page.
Operated by Dry Holidays SL · CIF B67894493 · Icod de los Vinos, 38340, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. Written contact: [email protected].