Interview With Richard Andrews, Website Director At Reed Business Information

I publish two directory based websites www.whatmedia.co.uk and www.recruitment-marketing.co.uk and am also responsible for The Recruitment Advertising Awards (The RADS). I'm primarily responsible for development and strategy across all three products, but also run our sales and admin teams. My background is in sales so I still get a buzz from developing new business and still hold a number of key accounts.

I started out as a classified telesales rep on RBI's Transport titles before moving across to recruitment working as an agency rep on Personnel Today. I then managed a number of Retail recruitment fairs before launching whatmedia.co.uk in 2000

At the moment it's got to be the pace at which the industry is changing. The proliferation of digital media presents an exciting but challenging environment to a large publisher like RBI which has to manage a large print portfolio whilst ensuring it evolves the online side of the business as quickly as possible. I really enjoy being part of it.

I'm really interested in seeing how Business networking sites like Linked In will be developed from a recruitment perspective and how I might apply interactive and community features into my own products. It's important to make the right decisions though and not implement something just because it's new.

I guess it has to be launching whatmedia.co.uk which we literally started from scratch collating information over the phone and storing it all in hundreds of boxes ready for inputting into a clunky old access database. Ironic that we were launching an online product but were probably accounting for most of RBI's paper usage at that time. We didn't have a site for the first 6 months and completely underestimated the complexity of Regional Press information. After numerous delays we finally went live although it took a good 12 months before the site was even half way decent. Still, I'm glad we persevered as the site has gone on to enjoy huge popularity and is used by virtually the entire UK recruitment advertising agency community on a daily basis.

Not sure it was much of an achievement but thanks for the positive spin!!! Daltons Weekly was my first full time job and was a really fun environment so I wasn't in any hurry to move on. Success was based on selling lineage ads to small hotels and guest houses and surviving in a sales environment that could have been the prototype for "The Office"

I originally trained as a journalist and used to write sporting articles in my spare time. I would have liked to have been a commentator at big sporting events, particularly boxing, tennis and golf.

No I sleep like a baby

Not one for spirits, I do enjoy a cold pint of beer though

My desk is hardly a hotspot for excitement but here goes:

Bart Simpson miniature, Plastic Ostrich, cow shaped squeezy stress thing left over from an old RADS entry, Vodafone mobile Broadband USB stick (sad but I like new gadgets) and lastly some great photos of my 3 year old son.