Before we meet, I am labouring under the misapprehension that Alistair Cox, the chief executive of Hays, has just taken delivery of a shiny new boat.

What better way to cock a snook at those who think the recruitment sector is the last place to take shelter during a sharp economic downturn?

Would Captain Cox pose for a photograph on it? He sets me straight. “The best boat is a friend’s boat,” says Cox. Spoken like a true, tight-fisted Yorkshireman in warm, flat vowels that have failed to be chiselled away during a globetrotting career.

Besides, Cox, 47, prefers to be in the water rather than on it. Wiry and beaming, he relaxes by being dragged around behind a motorboat.

Back at the office, Hays, with a market value of just over £1 billion, faces stormy waters of its own. Can a recruitment firm prosper as we head into recession? “I have not got a crystal ball, but it’s fair to say it’s going to get tougher,” concedes Cox over a mug of tea and cake at his office overlooking London’s University College Hospital.

He bounds into the room, cufflinks flashing, a nut-brown head with protruding ears. Like any good job candidate, Cox presents his business card and runs enthusiastically through his CV, ticking off time spent in the oil, cement and outsourcing industries that took him out of Britain for 15 of his 26-year career so far.

“Having not got on a plane for the first time until I was 15 years old, I haven’t got off them since,” he says.

Cox will mark his first anniversary at Hays with full-year results on September 2. The company made an operating profit of £216m in 2007. Despite the gloomy domestic economy, insiders say he has already brought some bounce to the company, which has suffered in the past with a cautious reputation.

“He has got enormous energy,” says Lesley Knox, chairman of the fund manager Alliance Trust and Hays’ senior non-executive director. “I’ve been impressed with his insight and decisiveness.”

As an example, Cox reduced headcount by 250 in Britain in the last quarter, but he doesn’t want to damage the business by slashing much deeper.

In the wake of cutbacks announced by Persimmon and Barratt Developments last week, it is no surprise when he says that placing people in the housebuilding industry is “very tough indeed”. The decline was “quite quick and quite dramatic”.

Investment banks are also sitting on their hands. Still, there are pockets of business that are holding up better, such as procurement, retail banking and healthcare.

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