Meet William

His mother built her own successful recruitment firm, inspiring William Andreae-Jones until this day. However, after attending the University of Alicante in Spain, William took to the seas and became a professional sailor. Four years later, he followed in his mother’s footsteps.  

"Being around the recruitment industry from a young age, I could see how my mother delivered an incredibly personalised service to very demanding clients, and how she made a huge impact through her work. After I had got the sailing out of my system (or at least restricted to weekends and the occasional offshore race) I was ready to start my own career in recruitment.   

I was given amazing opportunities when I joined Robert Walters’ London office in 2002, becoming one of their youngest ever Managers at the time. I was pushed to develop and grow and enjoyed every moment of working there. When the opportunity came to rejoin in 2020, it was an easy decision to step back into the values and culture. When I started in Switzerland, there were only 15 people in the team, and ample opportunity to develop in my role and the company. We were (and remain) very ambitious and I was given the freedom to grow our client base in our core finance and operations areas as well as our executive search function, which allowed me to work on high-level positions, communicate with CEOs and provided room to grow and be entrepreneurial. 

It’s not hard for me to outline the similarities between sailing and recruitment. Both are challenging to do well on your own or without being part of a team that knows how to work well together.

When I was racing maxi yachts, it took 22 people to complete some of the manoeuvres and each person moved with a choreographed precision. If one person was out of step the whole process could grind to a halt, or at worst someone could get hurt. When you work well as a team in search or recruitment, you can do amazing things together like in racing. You keep learning every day and trying to find where those incremental improvements are that are going to lead to big gains over time. 

I get the same energy from being part of a fantastic team and building something together at Robert Walters as I used to from going out on the water and being part of a racing team. The bonus is that when running a search no one asks me to get out of bunk and climb a mast in the middle of the ocean at 3am in high winds and rain!” 

William Andreae-Jones, Associate Director at Robert Walters Switzerland

As the Group HR Director at Lotus Bakeries based in Belgium, Stephanie De Lange had already collaborated with Robert Walters for quite some time. So when her company decided to open a head office in Switzerland, Stephanie did not hesitate and requested Robert Walters services in Switzerland. 

Following a reorganisation at his former employer, a digital asset bank where Marc had served as a CTO for over two years, he concluded that it was time to embark on new adventures. Thanks to Robert Walters, Marc has now found the perfect new job for him at Scrypt.