Vale Ed Gill

Today is a very sad day for the recruitment industry.

At 1 pm, Edmund Gill’s funeral service will commence in North Sydney and it will be packed with many devastated people from our industry.

Ed was killed in a tragic accident at his family property on Sunday, 23 February. He was two weeks younger than me.

I first met Ed in London during the earliest months of my first recruitment job, at Accountancy Personnel (now Hays) in London in early 1989.

Ed, who had joined the year before, had already established a high profile in one of the other City-based divisions of the company, Banking Personnel, when we met at Friday night drinks, a regular catch-up for many of the company’s younger London-based consultants.

I returned to Australia at the end of 1990 while Ed continued his London career before moving to Hays Australia in the mid-1990s.

My Hays tenure lasted less than two years. Ed never left.

At the time of his death, Ed was in the second half of his fourth decade with the company and still loving his work as Head of Client Development, based in Sydney.

Ed’s career at Hays represented everything good about the opportunities our industry and his employer provided. He progressed through a range of client-facing roles and even returned to the UK to work for Hays UK & Ireland for a period only recently before returning to Sydney in 2022.

Ed and I reconnected at the 2023 ATC at Luna Park in Sydney (pictured above, left with James Elliott, right) after more than three decades (although his recollection of me from London days was vague, at best!)

Hays Asia Pacific CEO, Matthew Dickason said of Ed, when I contacted him after learning of Ed’s death:

“Ed Gill was one of the greats. I personally worked with him for fifteen years and ascribe a large part of my success in the ANZ market post-GFC to him. He was always incredibly curious, high energy, and positive – seeing the opportunity in everything. His ongoing understanding of the broader market dynamics and where clients were likely seeing challenge or opportunity meant he constantly needled out the most unexpected relationships and service models to support our customers.”

He was also an incredible father and husband, with a close family that thankfully are finding strength together to work through things one day at a time. Everyone at Hays, across our global business, is devastated at his passing.”

When I subsequently saw Dickason at Bullhorn Engage earlier this month he shared that on, what was tragically to be Ed’s final day at work, he and Ed were in an hour-long meeting where Ed was, despite it being a Friday afternoon, was full of his usual energy and enthusiasm for the client opportunities and solutions he was advocating.

Jane McNeill is another Hays-lifer who started at Hays in London in the late 1980s, shortly before Ed and I did. Jane, also moved to Australia (although a few years after Ed) and is currently the local Hays managing director for professional recruitment. Jane has known Ed for the entirety of his professional life, and said to me of Ed, “We are all shocked and devastated, to be honest. He was such an engaging character, so full of energy and positivity and just a genuinely lovely person.”

Vale Ed Gill.

Thank you for the incredible example you set for your employer, your industry and your family.

Ed is survived by his wife, Cathy, son, Charles and daughter,Philippa.

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