Gary King

From the Touchline to the Kitchen

The plan was always football. His father played. His father's father played. As a child, King travelled with one of the London clubs because of his father's connection to it, staying in hotels on the road and absorbing something that would outlast the ambition itself. He was, by his own honest accounting, not quite good enough for the professional game. What he took from those years instead was a passion for hotels and hospitality.

So he went to catering college to train as a chef. While he was still studying, still travelling with Tottenham Hotspur at weekends, he struck up a conversation with the person responsible for feeding the players and talked his way into the club's kitchen. Monday to Friday he cooked in London restaurants. The hours were brutal and the pay was worse, and King, ever methodical, spent months researching an alternative before he made a move. Recruitment was the answer. He put himself in front of three agencies.

One of them was Blue Arrow, and the meeting did not go the way he had hoped. He was in his early twenties and had no template for how to present himself. The following day he flew to Rhodes on holiday with his partner and fell into conversation with an older couple seated beside them on the plane. Over the course of the week he told the woman the whole story, candidly and without agenda. She asked whether he still wanted the job. He said yes. She told him that the woman who had assessed him reported to her. King joined Blue Arrow in 1987, stayed three years, and worked his way up to manager.

Reed, and the Plan They Turned Down

From Blue Arrow he was recruited by a Hong Kong headhunting firm to open its London office. He opened it. Months later, with recession biting and the Gulf War underway, the office closed. An agency that placed people into agencies put him in front of two employers, Alfred Marks and Reed. Reed was a family business and was launching a hospitality recruitment arm. King joined, and his career found its shape.

He spent nine years there, rising to area manager and then operations manager. Convinced that hospitality was a growth market with more opportunity than the existing structure allowed, he wrote a business plan proposing that the Reed family separate their temporary and permanent recruitment businesses. They declined. Rather than let the idea die, he backed it himself. "I believed in myself," he says, and in 1999 he left.

Building Collins King & Associates

He founded Collins King & Associates that year with Matthew Collins, who had previously worked for him at Reed. The business grew quickly and then internationally: a joint partnership in Dubai in 2003, an office in Melbourne, Australia in 2005. When the financial crisis arrived, Australia and Dubai were closed. In 2012 King bought Collins out and ran the firm alone.

The pandemic nearly finished it. In 2020, with the business almost wiped out, King merged with two colleagues, Claire Downes and Ed Vokes, whose firm was called Evolve. The combined business trades today as The Evolve Group, structured in three arms: Collins King & Associates for permanent recruitment, which King leads, Evolve for temporary recruitment, and Enhance for DBS cleared staff. Thirty nine years after he first walked into Blue Arrow, his own name still sits on the permanent recruitment business.

It is a career defined less by uninterrupted ascent than by the discipline of rebuilding. Four economic shocks have hit his working life. Two of them closed offices he had opened himself, and two he met from the owner's chair. Each time he restructured rather than retreated, and each time the business came back.

The Three Names He Gives

Asked who shaped him, King does not hedge. The first is Sir Alec Reed, who passed away recently and whom he calls an absolute mentor. Watching Reed build a company from nothing taught King what he describes as the right way of doing recruitment: building relationships, and building long term partnerships rather than transactions. It remains the operating philosophy of his own firm.

The second is Brenda Bell, the woman who gave him his chance in the industry and his first manager, who died some years ago. From her he learned the unglamorous foundation of the job, the hard graft of knocking on doors as a junior and earning every conversation. He speaks of her as brilliant, and clearly still measures himself against her standard.

The third comes from outside the industry entirely. Kevin Campbell, who played professional football at the highest level for Arsenal and Everton, became one of King's closest friends before his death two years ago. King is now a trustee of the foundation established in his name. What Campbell taught him had nothing to do with recruitment and everything to do with conduct: how to do things right, how to look after people, how to show respect, and how to stay humble. "What I learnt from him has stood me through my career," King says.

From Fax Machines to AI

When King started in recruitment, the fax machine had only just arrived. He mentions it partly because his younger colleagues give him grief about it, and partly because it frames how violently the ground has shifted. Recruitment, he says, is now changing at phenomenal speed: AI that searches for candidates, compiles CVs and can be commanded to run research is compressing work that once defined entire job descriptions.

His read on what happens next is unsentimental and specific. At the lower end of the market, roles will disappear. Researchers, back up functions and back office work will be absorbed by AI, exactly as they are being absorbed in finance and banking. At the top end, he believes the opposite happens. Experience, judgement, knowledge and contacts do not automate, and AI becomes an accelerant for the recruiters who have them, delivering more insight and better research faster. Both things, he insists, are true at once. "It's both a help and a hindrance to recruitment."

His counsel to other talent leaders is less a maxim than a habit: stay in constant conversation with your peers about where the industry is going, and do it now rather than in five years. King practises it daily. His partner, Kay Jones Wolsey, is head of recruitment for BDO, was global head of resourcing for British Airways and before that group head of recruitment for Marks & Spencer, with more than thirty years in the profession herself. Between them, and with a wide circle of other industry leaders, the subject rarely changes: how fast the ground is moving and where everyone will be in five to ten years. His conclusion is refreshingly free of posturing for a man with thirty nine years behind him. "I'm both scared and excited about the future."

It is a fitting position for someone whose entire career has been built on being open to what he did not plan for. A footballing family that produced a chef. A job won back because he told the story honestly to a stranger on a plane. A business plan rejected by an employer that became a company of his own. King has spent four decades demonstrating that the people who last are the ones who keep talking, keep listening, and keep treating people well when it would be easier not to.