Joe Waterman

“Businesses thrive when you have a hierarchy that believes in people.”

Thirty seconds is all it takes Joe Waterman to turn a single request into a list of 500 commissioning contractors who are looking for work. For a recruiter who started out 15 years ago working from printed sheets of names, that speed is more than a convenience. It is the engine of a career now built around the AI boom itself.

Joe is Associate Director of the Contract and Freelance Division for EMEA at Clear Engineering Recruitment, a Bromley firm that specializes in data centers. The work centers on staffing the construction of mission critical facilities across Europe, and most of the data centers on the books are built to run artificial intelligence. The connection is stated plainly: without AI, the role would hardly exist, and the business would not be nearly as busy or as successful as it is today.

Yet a well-timed market is only part of the story. Running through every stage of this career is a conviction, formed early and reinforced often, that technology can win a search but only people can build a business.

A Gift for Conversation

Joe has been a natural conversationalist since childhood, never short of confidence with strangers. After a few short-lived jobs on leaving school, a chance conversation with someone in another line of work pointed toward recruitment. Joe had no idea what the job involved, and the explanation that followed has stuck almost word for word ever since: you talk to people every day, you build relationships, and you find people work.

The first steps came through a friend's company, where some early work turned into a genuine enjoyment of the craft. A move to ERSG, a global recruitment firm serving offshore wind, power and engineering, followed, though the timing coincided with a sharp contraction in the oil and gas market. After a couple of years there came a shift to UK construction, at a firm where a friend worked, and that is where the career took off.

When one of that firm's owners left to start something new, Joe was invited to help set up the venture. Across the best part of eight years, the team and the company grew together, reaching a 3.4 million pound turnover within six years. The eventual move into data centers and AI infrastructure brought bigger challenges, which was precisely the point. There is little reason to take on something new, the thinking goes, if the responsibilities stay exactly the same as the previous seven or eight years.

The Mentor Who Made Time

Early in any recruiting career, you learn what a strong billing year looks like, and you notice that the biggest billers are often the least available, focused tightly on their own desks. Nigel Wilson at ERSG broke that mold. Nigel had been with the firm almost since its founding and was billing 130 to 140 thousand pounds a month at the time, yet still sat the newcomer down and walked through everything, despite Joe working in a different department and division entirely.

That guidance did not stop after the first session. Nigel stayed available, messaging constantly and steering the way forward. The lesson was less about technique than character: someone at the top of the leaderboard could choose generosity over swagger. Watching Nigel made the goal clear, to manage a team one day and influence the next generation of recruiters. Joe credits Nigel as one of the main reasons for staying in the industry at all.

Today, a few of the leaders at Clear play a similar role. The company has been fully self-funded for nearly a decade, with 80 to 85 percent of its net profit going back into the business. That model of disciplined reinvestment offers a view of what the next step in recruitment looks like, and it is the blueprint Joe intends to follow when eventually launching a firm.

Riding the AI Wave

AI, in Joe's eyes, is unambiguously the future, both as the reason data centers are being built and as the toolkit that makes modern recruiting possible. A recruiter can spend three or four days turning over every stone on a search, while a competitor pairing AI with specialist sourcing software can generate excellent lists and launch wide outreach within moments. The manual approach simply cannot compete. Clear has tied much of its workflow to Claude, chosen for how well it integrates with the firm's other software, and the combination has been a game changer.

The enthusiasm extends well beyond the office. Claude and ChatGPT field daily questions large and small, and the appeal can be hard to explain to anyone who has not tried them. When Joe's father wonders why a search engine wouldn't do, the answer is that you cannot hold a conversation with one. It is, as Joe puts it, like carrying a personal assistant in your pocket. Across the data center sector, the pace of adoption over the past three years has been nothing short of incredible.

Building Through People

Proof of what belief in people produces sits close by. George, a colleague who leads the US business, set up that team about two and a half years ago, endured a difficult first year and a half, and has since generated 1.4 million pounds in the last 90 days, with a team that genuinely wants to fight for its leader. Chris, first met at 18 and now 30, has become divisional director for the European permanent side and grown it into a 3.5 million pound a year business.

The revenue is impressive, but the people are the real achievement. Hires who came from backgrounds such as personal training or supermarket work are now divisional managers on course to become associate directors, because Chris backs people from day one and gives them everything they need. For Joe, that is the standard worth striving for.

Advice for 2027

The advice for the year ahead is simple: trust in people. AI earns nothing but praise here, but the businesses and teams that scale and thrive are the ones whose leaders believe in people and give them time, both inside the company and out. That applies at every level, from directors looking after their staff to agencies looking after their people.

A comparison makes the point. Anyone selling cars would know every detail of the vehicle, down to the horsepower, so a recruiter presenting a great candidate should know that person just as thoroughly. Mistakes are part of the job, and every recruiter has learned from them. The constant, in Joe's words, is to invest and give time to everyone.