The vantage point
Nearly twenty years of asking men what they actually want.
James Roberts has spent his working life headhunting inside airline, aviation, travel, events, cruise, corporate travel, space travel and hospitality. He became an entrepreneur in 2005. He lives in the Canary Islands.
What the job actually was
Headhunting sounds like a job about filling roles. In practice it is thousands of long, private conversations with men at the exact moment they are weighing something — usually not telling their employer, often not telling anyone at home yet either.
That is the whole of it. Not a theory about work. Nearly twenty years of listening to men describe, candidly and off the record, what they wanted, what they were afraid of, and what they were pretending not to have noticed.
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
And what it was not
He is not an economist, a futurist, a technologist, a therapist or a careers adviser, and holds no qualification in any of them. He cannot tell you what SI (super intelligence) will do to your profession. He has never been able to tell anyone that, and those nearly twenty years mostly taught him to be suspicious of people who can.
What he has is a large, specific sample of how people behave when the rules change, gathered by accident, in one industry, over one working lifetime. This site is that and nothing more.
The thing that surprised him
Almost everyone he interviewed at the point of being headhunted — across continents, cultures and salary bands — wanted broadly the same things and worried about broadly the same things. He expected the differences to be cultural. Overwhelmingly, the main difference was language.
That is why this guide is not written for travel. It is written from travel, for any man watching his own ground move.
Why he is writing it down now
Because the current change is the first one in his career where the men asking him about it are not asking about a merger or a market. They are asking about whether the work itself remains work. That is a different question, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.
What can be offered is the shape of the last several rounds, and what the people who came through them well did. That is on one page, and the SI guide will talk it through with you.
No client, employer or candidate is ever named on this site, and the chat will not confirm whether James has worked with any company or person.