John Prendergast-Walsh
Managing Director

John started his Media sales career in 1998 with Sterling Publications Ltd. After a year selling display advertising across a number of vertical B2B publications, he was promoted to Sales Management, initially involved in the publishing business, and then moving on to managing a few industry websites for the newly acquired internet subsidiary Net Resources International. In 2001 John moved out of media sales and joined a London recruitment company. Although successful, due to disillusionment with the practices, and cold calling scatter gun approach, he set up Laird Recruitment in early 2002.

Leslie De Hoog
Commercial Director and Senior Consultant

Leslie started his media sales career in 1991. He continued to work at Sterling Publications for 12 years. Having managed his own sales team of over 20 sales people, Les was promoted firstly to General Manager of the print division of SPG and then in 2001 Les was made Sales Director of the web division (Net Resources International). He was responsible for a sales team of more than 80 staff. At the end of 2003 he was headhunted to become Sales Director of another major B2B publisher, before joining Hot Group PLC as Sales Director in September 2004. Hot Group are the third largest online recruitment business in the UK. After many years in the media sales, Les decided to focus on traditional recruitment, having recruited his own sales people for more than 15 years.

Ross Clifford
Divisional Manager and Director of Clifford Associates

Ross has worked in consumer Media Sales since graduating with a Marketing Communications degree in 2001. He quickly worked his way up to Advertising Manager of a niche high profile Fashion magazine in 2 yrs. As he was working for a small publisher he was not only selling to clients and their ad/pr agencies but finding new distribution outlets for the magazine in order to grow the circulation and compete with the more well-known fashion titles. After being in Press for three years, Ross felt it was time for a change and so became a radio consultant specifically pitching to and working with the major PR companies. Looking to develop his skills further, and put his knowledge to good use, he joined Laird Recruitment in 2006.

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