Jamie Williams

The Surveyor Who Wanted to Be in the Office

Jamie's first career was built on technical credentials rather than sales. He took a building surveying degree in Leeds, qualified, and was asked to join Savills, the international consultancy. It felt like the summit. He had landed the best possible platform for the best possible qualification, and assumed his ambitions were settled.

Roughly three years in, the picture shifted. The appeal of surveying had been the promise of being out and about rather than desk-bound, and Jamie discovered that what he actually wanted was the opposite: to be in an office, working with people. He approached a recruitment firm about other surveying roles, and the answer reframed everything. With his experience and the name on his CV they could place him almost anywhere, they said, but they were not convinced he wanted to be a surveyor at all. What the firm did want, as a small privately owned business at the time, was somebody with real specialism in the discipline he had just qualified in.

He took the leap, and within six months had roughly tripled his surveyor's salary, in what he readily calls an easier era for making money in recruitment. The work fit. He enjoyed the sales side and the relationship building, and he was not starting cold: he was recruiting in a field he already knew, talking to clients and candidates who often knew him. He was never, as he puts it, just a high street recruiter. There was some unlikely publicity too. Six months into the job, aged 26, he was approached by the BBC, went through the audition process, and spent six weeks filming the second UK series of The Bachelor, which, as he puts it, helped his profile.

The Leaders Who Set the Standard

Jamie is deliberate about who he learns from. The rule is simple: aspire to be like the people you work for, and if you neither admire them nor want to resemble them, do not follow them. At Savills that person was Howard Morgan, who died during the COVID period. Howard was his first real boss, and in Jamie's framing a leader, a mentor and a friend at once. He rejects the idea that those roles must be kept apart. Howard gave his graduates a highly structured way of learning the job while also being the person who would put an arm around a 22-year-old, and that mix of rigor and humanity is what Jamie carried into running his own teams.

At Macdonald & Company, his previous firm, the influence was Peter Moore, the reason he joined the business at all. Charismatic then and now, Peter taught by example: how to conduct yourself, and how to build relationships in a market that runs almost entirely on them. A third figure sits outside the industry. Jamie's father is in insurance, and Jamie has never treated a generation gap as a reason to stop listening. Someone 25 years ahead of you has already made the mistakes and is usually willing to say so.

Waking a Sleeping Giant

Jamie moved into management just as the global recession arrived in 2007, hardly a gentle apprenticeship. He worked his way up through a growing, privately owned business that went through a reverse takeover, became AIM-listed, and eventually put him on its ExCo. Then a competitor came calling, looking for someone with real time served in the industry to inject new blood into a team Jamie describes as a bit of a sleeping giant.

What has made the move more interesting than a straight rebuild is breadth. PSD Group works well beyond property and real estate, across banking, finance, technology, hospitality and leisure, and sports, which lets Jamie draw on clientele other teams have built and he had never previously touched. At home, the arithmetic of that year is family legend: the offer, then the baby. He now has a five-and-a-half-year-old, born during COVID, and an 18-month-old.

AI and the Five Minutes That Give It Away

"We are in a moment," is how Jamie frames the technology question, and he means both the excitement and the uncertainty. Nobody yet knows where the rabbit hole leads. What is clear to him is that even simple platforms can be enormously useful, and that sitting out the debate is not an option: if you are not on it, you are behind. PSD Group provides AI coaching internally and has a team dedicated to AI, technology and data. Jamie's own stack runs on a CRM called Mercury, with new systems under review and tools such as SourceWhale in testing.

A cautionary tale he tells came from a client over lunch. The company had a mid-management vacancy. It used AI to write the specification and tune it to the culture of the business, pushed it out across social channels, and collected applicants. The model flagged one candidate as perfect. That candidate had read the AI-written specification and used AI to build a CV against it, embellishing generously. Machine had recommended machine. Five minutes into the meeting, the mismatch was obvious, and Jamie has heard several versions of the same story.

His conclusion is not that the tools are the problem but that too few people use them well, which makes training and governance the real work. He is candid about a longer-term worry, as a leader and a parent both: that outsourcing thinking to a computer erodes the ability to put forward an idea of your own. AI can carry much of the searching and sourcing. It cannot tell a client what a candidate is actually like, or the culture that person is looking for.

What Jamie Tells the Next Generation

Recruitment is a pressure environment, and Jamie's management philosophy starts there. People do not thrive if they are simply left to get on with it. They need structure, support and guidance, and someone paying attention to whether they are being looked after rather than quietly absorbing stress. Training is the piece he prides himself on most.

The other half is a refusal to treat seniority as a monopoly on knowledge. Jamie is direct about leaders who reach a certain rank and decide it is their way or the highway, and he has built the opposite habit: he will turn to a junior colleague, say he does not understand something, and ask to be shown. Fairly tech-savvy, and still asking. That, more than any framework, is what he would pass on to anyone building a career in this market in 2026, along with the reminder that everyone can learn from someone at every level.