Vale Denis Waxman – global recruitment industry titan passes away

Photo credit: Hays plc 2006 Annual Report

Denis Waxman, the legendary founder of the business that offered me my first permanent job and ultimately evolved into the sixth-largest staffing company in the world, Hays, passed away on 22 August 2025 at the age of 78, from heart disease.

Hays CEO, Dirk Hahn, released a statement to recruiter.co.uk on 11 September 2025, “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Denis Waxman. Denis played a defining role in the history of Hays, having founded Accountancy Personnel in the late 1960s. Following Hays’ acquisition of the business in 1986, Denis became a driving force in transforming Hays into the organisation it is today. Denis will be remembered for the lasting impact he had on our business. Our thoughts are with Denis’s family and loved ones during this time.”

The news reached the local recruitment industry the previous week via a LinkedIn post from former Hays global executive, Jacky Carter.

By his own admission, Waxman “fell into recruitment” after returning to the UK from two years on a kibbutz in Israel.

His trip to Israel was prompted by leaving Hackney Downs School in north London with no qualifications and no specific ambitions.

He volunteered for the Israeli army at the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War against several surrounding Arab states. He returned to the UK and started his first permanent job, as a trainee accountant in London,  before promptly quitting without a job to go to.

He later told the BBC, “I hated it, I thought the number-crunching was incredibly old fashioned and the job probably didn’t suit my personality.”

Waxman’s basic accounting training was enough to secure him a support role in a London recruitment agency, which he soon got bored with. Waxman told his boss he didn’t have enough work to do. The owner suggested Waxman have a go at the recruitment side of the business, which he quickly discovered he “had a flare for.”

Deciding he was better suited as the employer than the employee, Waxman soon left and co-founded Career Care Group with business partner Richard Broyd, in 1968.

Trading as Accountancy Personnel, Waxman made his first placement, a trainee accountant, within two weeks and charged a placement fee of £38.50.

In a brief profile, published in the months leading up to his retirement in late 2007, Waxman said, “All I had going for me was enthusiasm: by the time our bigger competitors had sent a letter to the candidate with a dossier of what they had arranged, I would have got them three offers or already accepting a job. The business was built on that passion.”

Waxman’s way of making placements became the foundation of the company’s business model – call clients to book interviews with suitable candidates and worry about the resumes later (if at all).

“Passion is what got me to where I am,” he said, quoted in The Times’ obituary. “I didn’t have any qualifications and I don’t believe in balance. I’m either impassioned or completely uninterested. Colleagues always tell me it is always easy to tell what I think, and I certainly don’t see patience as a virtue.”

Accountancy Personnel’s first office was situated in a tiny space above a fish restaurant on Queen Victoria Street in London EC2. “I’d tell the candidates to wait in the pub while I made a few calls and sent them on a couple of interviews, or even placed them in jobs,” Waxman recalled. “What I did wasn’t sophisticated. I just had passion and enthusiasm, and made people feel they had been singled out for special attention.”

Accountancy Personnel grew quickly in the UK and expanded to Australia in 1976, through Accountancy Placements, which Waxman fully controlled after purchasing the shares of co-founder Nick Burton Taylor in the mid-1980s. Waxman’s company, Career Care Group, was acquired by Hays in 1986. Hays listed on the London Stock Exchange three years later.

At the time, Hays was a diversified private company with interests in document storage, business process outsourcing, haulage, logistics, and mail. A strategic review of the company’s operations in 2003 led to the board deciding to become a pure-play recruitment business, subsequently appointing Waxman, who had been on the company’s board since 1998, as the new CEO.

Waxman stepped aside as CEO in mid-2007 and retired from the Hays board on 15 November 2007, having successfully overseen the substantial growth of Hays beyond its traditional UK base in the previous decade and a half.

In Waxman’s final financial year in charge, Hays generated an operating profit of £216 million from net fee income of £633 million from 5022 consultants in 376 offices in 25 countries. In the most recent financial year, ended 30 June 2025, Hays generated an operating profit of £45 million from net fee income of £972 million from 6070 consultants in 207 offices in 31 countries.

In keeping with Waxman’s low public profile, his departure from Hays was acknowledged with five brief but warm and effusive sentences from the Board Chairman in the 2007 annual report. On the Hays website “Hays’ Specialist Recruitment business was founded as the Career Care Group in 1968”, under Our History, is the closest you get to any mention of Denis Waxman outside of the pre-2008 annual reports when he was on the board.

My entry into recruitment in February 1989, as 22-year-old in London, fresh from completing my economics degree in Hobart, was just eight months before Hays floated on the London Stock Exchange. Denis ran Accountancy Personnel (as it was still called then) from a modest office a few floors above the ground floor office that housed me and another dozen consulants who comprised the Victoria office perm and temp teams (including a young Ben Wood who, later that year, would move to Australia and ultimately marry his Australian temp desk colleague, Liz Cameron, and later lead Clicks IT to such success, with Beddison Group founder, Tony Beddison, that Japanese company Outsourcing purchased the business).

Denis would frequently drop into our office to see how things were going, which always kept our manager, Kim, on her toes and forever urging us to “get on the phone” as a quiet office was, in the world of Denis Waxman, an office not making placements.

Although I was only in that office for a short period and had few exchanges with Waxman, his presence was unmistakably large, and he was nothing other than polite and interested in what I had to say. The many comments on Jacky Carter’s post from former and current Hays staff, reminiscing warmly about their experiences of Waxman, are a testament to the impact and respect he had across the Hays world, even though he retired 18 years ago.

Waxman was as low-profile in retirement as he was in business, eschewing board roles, happily devoting himself to his wife, children, and grandchildren (Waxman and his wife, Carole’s children, took polar opposite career paths to their father, becoming career academics. Son Dov is Professor of Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and daughter Zoe is the inaugural Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford).

Waxman used his wealth to support medical charities and those associated with the Jewish community, especially Yachad, the British Jewish organisation seeking to foster dialogue and peace in the Middle East.

The Times reported reading, especially history and biography, as his favourite pastime. Travel, visiting museums and art exhibitions, the opera, and theatre were other interests he devoted more time to in retirement.

There are only a few genuine legends of the global staffing industry, and Denis Waxman was undoubtedly one of them.

Thank you, Denis, for starting a business that ultimately changed my life and the lives of tens of thousands of others around the globe.

May you rest in peace.

*corrected and updated on 15 September 2025 from information in Denis Waxman’s obituary in The Times.

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