Reed.co.uk
Reed logo
|
|
| Reed Executive | |
| Employment Agency | |
| Industry | Recruitment |
| Founded | Hounslow, United Kingdom 7 May 1960 |
| Founders | Sir Alec Reed |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
|
Number of locations
|
116 |
|
Key people
|
James Reed, Chairman and CEO |
| Services | Employment agencies, recruitment, human resource consulting, outsourcing |
| Owners | Privately owned |
REED is an employment agency based in the United Kingdom. The company was founded in 1960 by Sir Alec Reed CBE. Reed's son, James Reed is the current CEO and Chairman. REED also offers training, outsourcing and HR consultancy services. The company’s website, reed.co.uk, was established in 1995 and doubles as an employment website. In 2014 Alexa ranked reed.co.uk as the UK's largest employment agency website.
REED Group claims 3000 employees across 450 business units and 116 locations worldwide, in 20 recruitment specialisms. The majority of its operations are in the UK but the firm also has offices in the Middle East, Asia and continental Europe
The company has three main divisions:
The economic expansion and full employment of the 1950s led to a flourishing of employment agencies in the UK. While working as an accountant at Gillette, Alec Reed noticed that he was signing off on numerous payments to employment agencies, giving him the idea to start his own.
While still employed at Gillette, Reed worked a second job in an estate agency opposite Hounslow bus station. The estate agency’s premises was split into two businesses, with one side selling property and the other side selling carpets. Noticing that the carpet business was struggling, Reed approached the owner and offered to rent that portion of the premises for his fledgling employment agency.He funded the launch with £75 taken from his Gillette pension fund. The 26-year-old Reed opened the first branch of Reed Employment on 7 May 1960. Reed’s former colleagues at Gillette provided him with his first few placements. The firm then expanded to a second branch in Feltham. Turnover grew rapidly but, as Reed later wrote in his autobiography:
With the newer branches struggling, Reed sought the help of an advertising agency newly founded by Maurice and Charles Saatchi; Reed later claimed that their work had no perceptible impact on the business. Instead, Alec Reed began to publicise the company by experimenting with the location of Reed offices. In the early 1960s, most employment agencies were located in first or second floor offices. Copying the example of rival Alfred Marks, Reed began moving his offices to ground floor locations on main shopping streets, such as London’s Oxford Street, so that they could be more easily seen by the public.
The end of the 1960s saw a bull market in UK share prices, prompting stock market flotations by a number of rival employment agencies, including Brook Street Bureau and Alfred Marks.
...
Wikipedia