Alistair Cox

(By Richard Holway 8.00pm 4th May 09) Interesting profile of Alistair Cox, CEO of Hays, the UK's biggest recruitment group, in The Times today - In a world of employers and workers, meet the middleman.

I got to know Cox quite well when he was recruited by the much-missed Hilary Cropper to be her successor at Xansa. I remember writing a rather rude piece questioning how "someone with a background in cement" knew anything about IT. Well Cox had joined Xansa from Blue Circle!

But Cox showed that it is management skill, not IT, that often matters more today. Cox certainly took Croppers offshore vision to undreamt of heights.

The Times' interview has the following paragraph about his time at Xansa.

"He was hired by the late Hilary Cropper as chief executive of her Xansa IT services business. That entailed creating one of the biggest UK-owned offshore outsourcing operations, employing more than 6,000 people in India and frequent visits to India — “a fascinating place as well. Xansa was picking up contracts from the likes of the BBC and the NHS, increasingly offering not only IT services but back-office processing as well. Mr Cox wanted to move farther into new areas, such as human resources and other administration. Ms Cropper was no longer running the business full-time and the rest of the board suffered a sharp attack of “risk aversion”. Mr Cox put himself out of a job."

I think that fits with my understanding of the situation at the time. As we all know, Xansa was subsequently acquired by Steria in Oct 07; soon after Cox departed.