You qualified as a management accountant in the sixties. What drew you to the profession?
When I left school at 16 my mother marched me down to night school, where I signed on for a course that I don’t think either of us understood. It turned out to be the Institute of Chartered Secretaries’ qualification. I struggled with the exams, failing a number of times, but eventually passed. I got a job at Gillette and started studying to become a certified accountant. Then, aged 26, I started my business and wrote to my institute to inform it of my change of details. It wrote back, telling me that I couldn’t be a student if I was self-employed, and threw me out.

In 1961, I decided to focus my business on recruiting accountants. This was when I realised the real value of the qualification provided by the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants (CIMA’s original name) and embarked on the course myself. It was clear that management accountants were in high demand in the recruitment market.

Why did you set up your company? During my time at Gillette I was desperate to be self-employed. It wasn’t about earning more money. I was earning £900 at Gillette; I simply wanted to be self-employed earning £900 a year. So I started Reed Employment in Hounslow – and it grew. I soon had three branches with a manager in each. It wasn’t a full-time job to manage three managers, so I devoted my spare time to starting Reed Executive. Our unique selling point was that all of our consultants had to be qualified accountants. After the business went public in 1971 we repositioned it as a multi-branch operation, having previously concentrated solely on the City of London. Today, we have more than 400 branches, as well as reed.co.uk – the biggest recruitment website in the country.

What have been the biggest changes to the role of management accountants, and to the environment they work in, since you qualified? CIMA has had a fantastic opportunity over the decades, because management accounting is much more important than financial accounting. A lot of chartered accountants are focused on tax, as that’s where their biggest fees come from, but management accounting is a much broader, more varied field. We have a lot of CIMA members in our company – we all talk the same language. Yet I still believe that the accountancy profession across the world has a long way to go. I don’t think it’s fully kept up with the changing world around it.

The complexity of business today is not reflected in the practice of accountancy. Computers simply splurge out numbers and can provide a huge amount of detail, which initially seems to be a positive thing. But there needs to be much more focus on the performance of people and on identifying the really meaningful figures. Our business is a good example: we have hundreds of branches, but we don’t focus on how one branch compares against another; we focus on how successful our individual people are, because that’s what really matters.

In 1995, reed.co.uk was the first site of its kind to be launched by a UK recruitment company. How did you go about identifying and harnessing the impact of the internet on the recruitment business so early? Here at Reed, if we see a bus going somewhere, we will tend to jump on it – whatever the commercial opportunity in question. The downside risk of jumping on a bus that doesn’t go anywhere is very small, but the downside risk of missing the right bus is very large. So, when the internet emerged, we jumped straight on that bus.

Initially we put only Reed’s jobs on the site. Then we opened it up to vacancies advertised in other media. One of my young colleagues suggested allowing our competitors to post their advertisements on our site for free. My initial reaction was: “It costs us £500,000 a year to run this site – you must be mad.” But a week or so later he repeated the suggestion. Thank goodness he did. I agreed and the decision proved to be the key to our success in becoming the UK’s number one job site. One of the favourite sayings of my son James [the group’s chairman] is that “a crowd attracts a crowd”. This is exactly what our web strategy achieved.

Today we still give away 50 job listings to other agencies, but we charge for the rest. Charging for listings on the site has actually improved it, as it eliminates the amount of duplication that we used to have when agencies could post as many jobs as they wanted.

When you received your knighthood this year, you said: “Without charity what’s the point of business? And without business there would be no charity.” What’s your advice to other business leaders who want to maximise their organisations’ contribution to charitable causes? Contributing to charity isn’t an organisational issue. It’s personal. I don’t think that I should give away my company’s money; I should give my own.

I recently coined the phrase “financial obesity is ugly”. There are about 3,400 mass-affluent individuals in the UK – those with more than £20m in personal wealth. We need public pressure on these people to donate to charity. We tend to admire the guy with the new BMW, yacht or private aeroplane. The social pressure is on these people to show off by buying toys. We need more public pressure that encourages them that financial obesity is ugly.

Why did you get involved in charitable causes? It was nothing to do with money; it was about fairness. My mother taught me that the biggest sin was meanness. She couldn’t bear it – and this was instilled into me. After I floated my company in 1971 I took a bit of a breather and set up a charitable employment agency for drug addicts. Over the years I’ve started a number of other charities, including Womankind, which works to reduce violence against women. I visited Ethiopia in the late 1980s, and that led to the launch of Ethiopiaid, which strives to reduce poverty, preserve health and enhance education in the country.

Today the Reed Foundation owns 18 per cent of the Reed Group’s shares. I like to tell co-members: “One day each week you’re working for mankind; not just for the company.”

TheBigGive.org.uk was launched in 2007. What’s the premise behind it? It’s a virtual charity that started as a kind of Wikipedia for big givers. Initially we catered only for people who could donate at least £100,000 – and there aren’t that many of those around. In the first year we had a few contributions. Then I decided to put up £1m in order to match donations. We put it up at 10am one Monday and it took only 45 minutes for that sum to be equalled by other donors.

The real innovation was what we’ve called “challenge matching” – encouraging donors to compete to get there first. Then we allowed people to donate on three levels. First, you could be an online donor and get your money doubled. Second, you could pledge to double another donor’s contribution – increasing your donation fourfold. Lastly, you could be a donor who sponsors all donations across a specific sector – cancer charities, for example. These donors get to see their original contributions increase sixfold.

Youth unemployment is rising. How should this problem be tackled? Reed in Partnership is a welfare-to-work initiative that has helped more than 115,000 people to find a job. But what society should aim for is not welfare to work but school to work.

If I had a magic wand, every comprehensive school would have a sixth form catering for children who know that they aren’t cut out for the academic study offered by a traditional university. These young people should be given access to personal advisers who will explain the career options available and teach them general work skills, as well as how to behave in the workplace. These advisers should then help the students to find jobs. As soon as these young people find employment, they should be free to leave the sixth form. If, six months later, the job falls through, they should come back to school. At the moment young people are all turned out of school on the same day each year, flooding the market. It’s a recipe for disaster – a recipe for criminality.

In an increasingly globalised market for talent, where do you think the UK can maintain any competitive advantage? Developing our strength as a centre of ideas and innovation is our only hope. Companies need to set up suggestion schemes for their employees. We awarded £100,000 to a guy who came up with an idea for reed.co.uk. The Reed employee who has the best idea for 2011 will get £50,000. Recruitment is a commodity market, like a growing number of other sectors. But a new idea can be a rocket that explodes the competition.