Page 183 - James Caan - The Real Deal

17 · The Recession

of management were stripped out: no one was hiring, and the
recruitment industry nosedived. The value of shares in recruitment
companies virtually halved overnight. The phrase we kept hearing
on the phones was ‘headcount freeze’, and the more it got repeated
in the office, the more it started to grate.
I had never experienced a recession before and had no idea how
you ran a business in such a climate. All I had known was seven
years of fantastic growth and I was completely stunned by it, and
utterly clueless about what I could do to change things. After all,
I couldn’t make my clients hire people for whom they didn’t have
a budget in that kind of environment. When I asked my accountant
for a projection of where we might be in a year’s time he said:
‘Making a loss.’ That really scared me.
Previously, when things had gone wrong I’d been able to try a
different approach, find a different angle, but the economy was so
bad – unemployment was high, interest rates were high, reposses-
sions were at a record level and the stock market was reeling. The
economic boom that had underpinned our success in the eighties
had gone spectacularly bust, and there wasn’t anything I could do
that would make a difference. I called up all my old contacts but
no one was hiring, and if there weren’t going to be any vacancies
for the foreseeable future then I thought we really might as well
have turned off the lights and gone home. I found myself in the car
driving into work in the morning wondering if it was worth it –
there just wasn’t anything to do. I started to get resignations from
the staff who – naively, as it turned out – thought that things
wouldn’t be as bad at another agency. The office that had once
been full of noise and banter and bell-ringing was now eerily quiet,
and it got so bad that I really didn’t see a future for Alexander
Mann.
We used to have these productivity boards on the walls of the
office. When we picked up a vacancy it was marked up in green
marker pen; when we had a candidate out on interview that was

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