About

Who is Stuart Blake

You are being guided through this course by someone who has sat on both sides of the hiring desk for over forty years, and who has spent the last seven years applying that experience full time to coaching people through exactly the transition you are going through now.

What follows is not a biography for its own sake. It is context for why the approach in this programme looks the way it does, and why the guidance you will work through in the chapters ahead is built on evidence rather than opinion.

A career built on both sides of the hiring desk

Stuart Blake has held managing director and chief executive level roles across a forty year recruitment leadership career, including at TMP Worldwide and Monster.com, Harrison Willis and HW Group PLC, and Spherion Corporation. At Greatfleet PLC, Stuart served as Chief Executive Officer, having listed two recruitment businesses on the London Stock Exchange, including acquiring Longbridge PLC by way of a reverse takeover and relisting on AIM. Stuart has led a global recruitment group spanning seventeen UK and European locations with more than one thousand staff, opened offices across the UK and internationally, and completed acquisitions and disposals both in the UK and overseas. Stuart has recruited at chief executive, finance director, operations director and legal partner level, which means the advice in this programme has been tested against what actually gets someone hired at the most senior levels of an organisation, not just what sounds sensible in theory.

That breadth matters practically. Someone who has only ever coached has to take an employer's hiring criteria on trust. Someone who has spent decades building, listing and running recruitment businesses, and who has personally sat on the hiring side of that desk at chief executive level, has watched those criteria play out directly, thousands of times, across almost every sector and seniority level. Across that career, Stuart has been directly instrumental in more than two thousand five hundred people successfully gaining employment.

Seven years of dedicated coaching practice

Stuart founded Coach 1st in 2018 on a simple principle: no one left behind. That principle is not a slogan. It shapes how every programme is priced and delivered, on the basis that a first jobber with no work history yet deserves exactly the same quality of coaching as a departing chief executive, not a lesser version of it. Since founding Coach 1st, Stuart has personally coached more than seven thousand people, spanning first jobbers and the long term unemployed through to chief executives and board directors, applying the same standard of personalised, confidence first coaching at every level.

Stuart holds ICF certification across professional, executive and career coaching practice, alongside certification in confidence and life coaching and in ADHD coaching, and Transformational Life Coach accreditation. That combination matters because career transition rarely arrives as a single, tidy problem. It often carries an executive dimension, a confidence dimension and sometimes a neurodivergence dimension, all at once, and a coach trained across all of them is better placed to work with the whole person in front of them rather than a narrow slice of the situation.

By the numbers

Results that are tracked and published, not promised

Every Coach 1st programme is designed, written and delivered personally by Stuart, with outcomes tracked and published rather than simply promised. The Coach Me programme, designed and written for Generation UK and Ireland and the Greater London Authority's London Digital Skills Hub, achieved job outcomes of between fifty two and fifty eight per cent for long term unemployed participants, more than double the national average for comparable programmes. This group typically faces the steepest barriers to re-entering work, which makes the scale of that result particularly meaningful rather than a figure inflated by an easier cohort.

Across career coaching programmes designed and delivered personally, eighty seven per cent of job seeking coachees have received job offers within sixteen weeks, alongside ninety per cent outplacement success within twenty six weeks. As a career coach for Generation UK and Ireland, Stuart designed and wrote the Careers Support Programme as an integrated career bootcamp for more than two thousand participants, lifting engagement and job outcomes by combining twenty four hour access to an online platform with one to one coaching, weekly workshops and daily interview drop in sessions, the same blended approach this programme continues.

A coaching philosophy shaped by the hiring side

The recurring theme across all of this is that coaching content here has been pressure tested against real hiring decisions, not developed in isolation from them. Where the chapters that follow tell you what a hiring manager is actually looking for in a CV, an interview answer or a negotiation, that guidance reflects decades spent making exactly those decisions, not a general theory about how hiring is supposed to work. Where the chapters address confidence and mindset, that guidance reflects seven years of watching, in person, what genuinely rebuilds someone's confidence during a transition, and what only appears to.

Global reach and trusted partners

Stuart has designed and delivered employability and career coaching programmes for international companies, universities and educational establishments, including delivery via Fourth Rev for the London School of Economics, King's College London, the University of Cambridge, the Bank of England and Google. Stuart has delivered career, executive and life coaching programmes across the UK, Europe and the UAE, and has supported chief executives and board directors through outplacement and redundancy for international corporations, including through Renovo. Through Recro Consulting, Stuart has reached participants with significant barriers to employment across multiple Department for Work and Pensions cohorts in London and the Home Counties, and has signed the Armed Forces Covenant, formalising a commitment to supporting service leavers and the armed forces community.

This range, from board directors of international corporations through to participants facing significant, longstanding barriers to work, is deliberate rather than incidental. It is the same range you will see reflected in the case examples throughout this programme, because the coaching approach genuinely does not change with seniority. Only the specifics of the conversation do.

Why this matters to you

Most career advice you will find online is generic. It has not been tested against thousands of real conversations with people going through exactly what you are going through now, and it rarely publishes the results it actually achieves. Everything in the chapters that follow has been shaped by direct coaching experience and direct recruitment leadership experience, not theory borrowed from elsewhere, and by a track record that is measured and shared rather than simply asserted.

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Who is Tony Larcombe

Alongside the coaching expertise behind this programme, it is worth knowing something about Tony Larcombe, a longstanding friend and colleague of Stuart's, and the technology and strategic thinking he brings to how Coach 1st builds and delivers its platforms.

A career in technology leadership

Tony Larcombe is an experienced Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer and business technology strategist, with thirty years of transformational leadership across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Tony and Stuart worked together thirty years ago, and remain friends and colleagues to this day. Their careers have since crossed paths again through shared history at TMP Worldwide and HW Group. Tony's own career has also spanned organisations including Logitech, Data Supplies, CSC, Texas Instruments, iRevolution, Accenture and FiveTen Group.

Tony's achievements include creating an AI candidate matching system built on Bayesian mathematics, achieving over ninety five per cent first time automated matching accuracy, building what is recognised as the world's first true SaaS solution, and successfully executing a management buyout, two initial public offerings, and numerous company acquisitions.

Current focus

Since stepping back from mainstream business in 2009, Tony has spent over sixteen years working in fractional Chief Technology Officer, board and advisory roles, helping organisations navigate complex technology challenges. Current roles include Chief Technology Officer at 4Square Capital, Chief Technology Officer and Founder of 4Square Innovations, and Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Demetech Global, alongside technology advisory work for multiple startups and Non-Executive Director and mentoring positions.

Areas of expertise

Tony's expertise spans technology strategy and roadmapping, executive leadership through complex technology decisions, business transformation and digital change, startup advisory from seed stage through to Series C, scalable SaaS platform development, and artificial intelligence and machine learning, including practical, ethically implemented AI applications such as recruitment automation and predictive analytics.

Beyond the boardroom

Outside his technology career, Tony is an experienced diver, instructor and public safety search and rescue diver, a background that reflects the same combination of technical precision and calm, methodical judgement under pressure that runs through his approach to technology leadership.