About James
A headhunter, not a technologist.
Headhunters see the reorganisation before the staff do, because the brief arrives first.
Twenty years watching companies reorganise
James Roberts was born in Manchester in February 1976. He spent more than twenty years in travel and hospitality headhunting and ran a firm of around twenty staff.
That trade is a peculiar vantage point. Headhunters see the reorganisation before the staff do, because the brief arrives first: the role that is being quietly replaced, the director who does not yet know, the team being rebuilt around one hire. He spent two decades in the gap between what a company says is happening and what has already been decided.
That is what this site is built on, and it is the reason it refuses to forecast. Twenty years of watching this taught him that the announcement is always late and the pattern is always visible earlier to the person doing the work.
What that is good for
Knowing how companies actually behave when work changes. Knowing what happens to men in their late forties and fifties in that process, which is not the same as what happens to men in their thirties. Knowing what a hiring conversation sounds like from the other side of the desk.
Knowing, above all, how differently a man is treated when he arrives with evidence rather than with a feeling.
Where it stops
He is not an AI researcher, not a technologist, not an economist and not a careers adviser. He cannot tell you what the tools will do next, and he has no privileged information about anybody's industry, including his own.
He has not been through this particular thing himself. His own working life changed for other reasons. Anybody claiming to have already survived the specific situation you are in is selling something, because it is happening now, to everybody, at once.
The other part of the record
He drank daily from eighteen to forty-five while running that firm, went into residential treatment at Delamere in Cheshire in June 2020, and has not drunk since 20 June 2020. He has never relapsed. He moved to Tenerife in December 2020.
It is on this page because it is on every site in this network and because men reading at three in the morning with a drink in their hand should know who is writing. It is not offered as a comparison, and nothing here suggests that because one man managed something, another will. There are separate guides in this network for that subject, written properly, rather than a paragraph on a work site.
Declared interests
No arrangement, commercial or otherwise, with any company that builds or sells AI tools. No affiliate links, no advertising, no sponsorship. No recruitment services sold here and no referral or introduction fees taken from anyone, in either direction.
He was a paying patient at Delamere, which is declared wherever it is mentioned. This site is paid for by network membership and by James. The rules it is written under are published in full on the editorial standards page.