Why James knows the other end

Twenty years of the calls afterwards

James Roberts, born in Manchester in 1976, spent more than 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.

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 to Icod de los Vinos in the north of Tenerife, where he and his wife ran a five-year bed and breakfast, since 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.