Andy Oakes

The Work That Fits Nowhere Else

The move to Zachary Daniels came six years ago, after nearly a decade running an independent operation, and the arrangement remains deliberately unusual. Fundamentally still self-employed, the partner works under the firm's umbrella in what Andy calls a mutually beneficial relationship: the infrastructure and brand of an established consultancy, with the autonomy of someone who has already proved they can build a desk from nothing.

The practice itself has broadened considerably. Mainstream retail was left behind several years ago, and the week now runs through technology, wholesale, food service and manufacturing and engineering, alongside close work with private equity houses and the startup and founder-led organisations in their portfolios. Much of the mandate is senior, and a significant share now sits at C-suite level, a room that demands a very different conversation from the one a first-year consultant learns to have.

Professional Sport, a Degree, and the First Job Available

Before any of it, there was professional sport, played for several years before a return to education and a degree in HR management. That degree was taken less out of any burning ambition for a career in HR than out of a determination to have one to show for the time. Travel followed. On returning home, the first role available happened to be in recruitment, and that was the whole of the strategy.

The desk was civil engineering in Leeds, Yorkshire, filling quantity surveyors, project managers and similar roles. Eighteen months in, two things had become clear: the skill set the job demanded was there, and Manchester was the next move. A retail recruitment business in that city became the place where the trade was properly learned, in the sector that would shape the following two decades. Andy progressed through the business and eventually ran its Manchester team.

Then came a year out and another trip around the world, and with it the decision that tends to arrive at the same point in most recruitment careers. As Andy frames it, you either leave the industry entirely or you get tired of lining somebody else's pockets and go it alone. Going it alone worked for eight or nine years before the move to Zachary Daniels.

The People Who Shaped the Method

Ask about influence and the first name offered is Dan, an early boss in Manchester and a colleague across six or seven years. The two remain in touch. What is notable is how the learning happened. There was no formal coaching programme; instead there was proximity. Andy stayed close, shadowed, watched from a short distance, picked out the best bits and quietly discarded the parts that were never going to suit. Much of the approach to recruitment, and to people, traces back to that stretch of deliberate observation.

The sporting background did work of its own. Professional sport teaches you to enjoy the highs and handle the lows without either one distorting your judgment, and that steadiness is something recruitment rewards. It is a point raised often with colleagues who take it hard when a process collapses at the final stage. That is simply the nature of dealing with people.

Clients belong on the list too. Getting as close to clients as possible has always been the working method, and the C-suite and director-level leaders encountered over 22 years taught the intricacies of different personalities and profiles, and, just as importantly, how to feel comfortable operating at that altitude. Then there are the colleagues: across roughly 40 consultants at Zachary Daniels, there is something worth borrowing in almost every one of them. "By no means am I the finished article," Andy says. "There is still plenty I can get better at." Before any of that came family, and on this the assessment is direct: two hugely influential parents shaped a character well matched to the industry.

Artificial Intelligence as Accelerant, Not Replacement

On technology the verdict is unambiguous: on balance, artificial intelligence is more beneficial than not for recruitment. It has stripped out enormous amounts of the administrative trawling that once consumed the working week. Zachary Daniels uses it heavily inside its databases, for formatting CVs and pulling together client communications, work that now happens at the click of a finger. Mapping out an industry for a new client, running competitor analysis, building salary surveys, writing profiles and framing a view of what a market is doing can all be done at a speed that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

The caveat matters as much as the enthusiasm. Treating whatever the machine returns as gospel, Andy argues, is naive; errors are still made, and human input on the output remains non-negotiable. As for the fear that greeted the technology's arrival, and the widespread assumption that it would take everyone's jobs, that prediction gets short shrift. "People still want to buy from people they trust, people they can see and touch and feel." Used properly, the technology simply means more work gets done in a week, which is why the firm has already invested significantly in its back-of-house systems and the infrastructure around them.

What to Carry Into 2026

The through line is that the tools change and the fundamentals do not. What remains scarce, in Andy's account, is the person a chief executive will call when a hire genuinely matters, and that relationship is built the slow way, through proximity, curiosity and a willingness to learn from every client conversation rather than simply transact through it.

For anyone entering the industry, the model on offer is straightforward enough to be genuinely useful: get close to the best operator in the room, take what fits and leave what does not, use the technology to buy back hours rather than to outsource thinking, and accept that in a business built on people some processes will not go to plan. Twenty-two years in, that combination has produced a practice defined not by a single vertical but by the confidence of clients who keep returning with the problems nobody else can categorise.