The ex-private detective who’s eFinancialCareers’ longest serving employee

Before he spent over a quarter of a century working for eFinancialCareers, Andrew Skinner was a private detective. 

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

It was a brief interlude in the career of one of the company’s most valued employees. “I worked for Pinkerton’s in Hong Kong,” says Skinner. “Their logo is the eye that never sleeps, and my job was to track down sellers of fake goods.”

It was a job that he did for only a year, which was fortunate because it came with risks that are rare in financial services recruitment. “We’d usually have a bodyguard with us, and they’d pull us off the job as soon as there was any triad involvement,” he adds. “I had a briefcase with a camera in it. I went to one job, where I was interviewing someone selling fake cosmetics. I told him I wanted to open a shop, and he told me that if I was lying to him, he would kill me.” 

Skinner left. Initially, he thought he might set up his own agency investigating marital infidelities among Hong Kong expats but his wife dissuaded him. A friend advised him to call eFinancialCareers’ founder John Benson and so began a long and fortuitous career that continues to this day. 

“I was initially working for Financial News,” says Skinner. “But then John Benson launched eFinancialCareers.”

In 2000, it seemed crazy for people to post their CVs online, but they did. Every job posted had to be manually uploaded by two overworked Kiwis. “In true English style, we were the underdog,” says Skinner. “We undercut the FT’s careers pages and we won.”

This article is part of a series to celebrate eFinancialCareers' 25th birthday

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.