Karl Fairbrother
CEO (Worker Direct Global Limited)

WDG is the brainchild of construction industry veteran, Karl Fairbrother. A native of Warrington in Cheshire, he began his career in the early 1992 as a labour consultant. He soon discovered he was good at connecting people and started breaking company sales records. After a few years, Karl caught the entrepreneurial bug and started his own recruitment business at the age of just 20.

The idea for WDG came many years later in 2016 when he was visiting clients in London. It suddenly hit him how outdated, slow and ineffective the recruitment process in the construction industry had become, not to mention expensive.

Because of how recruitment works within the industry now, here’s what often happens.

Workers turn up for jobs but don’t last the day because they either don’t like the job or don’t have the right skills ...
… or workers leave after a few days because they get a better job offer from elsewhere of a few pounds more ...
… or workers don’t even turn up for jobs and don’t tell the contractor why.

Karl’s idea was to cut out the middlemen and use technology to make the recruitment process modern, fast and effective – and inexpensive.