There’s a paradox running through every hiring conversation we’ve had with clients this year.
On paper, the market has loosened. UK unemployment sat at around 5.2% in early 2026, the highest in nearly five years, and total vacancies have fallen roughly 14% year-on-year to just over 730,000. By those numbers, hiring should be easier than it’s been in some time.
And yet, when we sit down with CTOs, finance directors, COOs and HRDs, the conversation is the same one we were having in 2023: “we can’t find the people we need.”
Across our three businesses, we’re seeing the same pattern repeat in different forms. The headline market is easier; the roles you actually need to fill are not. This is our read on where the pressure sits, what’s driving it, and what it means for the roadmap you’re building between now and the end of the year.
The headline numbers (and what they hide)
The macro picture is genuinely more balanced than it has been. Vacancy volumes are down. Time-to-hire for generalist roles has shortened. Salary inflation has cooled across large parts of the market.
But 76% of UK employers still report difficulty filling positions – down from 80% the previous year, but a long way from the loosening the headline numbers suggest.
The reason is straightforward. The roles that became easier to fill are the ones that were always reasonably well supplied: standard generalist positions, mid-level functional roles, entry-level work. The roles that were hard in 2023 are still hard in 2026, because the shortages were structural, not cyclical.
Treating the loosening as uniform leads to underinvestment in sourcing for the roles that will actually delay your roadmap. The organisations getting this right in 2026 are the ones who’ve stopped treating “the hiring market” as a single thing.
Where the tightness actually sits
Three areas, drawn from what we’re seeing daily across the Group.
Specialist technology.
The 2026 tech market isn’t difficult across the board, but it’s acutely difficult in specific places. Cybersecurity (particularly cloud security and OT security), data engineering and ML infrastructure, DevSecOps and platform engineering, and embedded software for the UK’s growing semiconductor and defence-tech sector are all sitting in chronic shortage.
Generalist software engineering hiring has loosened. Specialist engineering hiring hasn’t, and the candidates in those areas are typically employed, not searching.
Modern finance functions.
Almost half of UK businesses plan to grow their finance teams this year, with FP&A, financial control, and commercially fluent business partnering roles among the hardest to fill.
What’s changed isn’t just volume, it’s the shape of the role. As AI tools become embedded in reporting and forecasting, finance leaders are hiring less for data wrangling and more for commercial storytelling, scenario analysis, and partnering with the business.
Candidates who can do both technical finance and commercial influence are scarce, and the ones who exist are being courted.
Project and transformation delivery.
Demand for genuine outcome-based delivery (Statement of Work, scoped programmes, fixed-price implementations) has grown sharply, driven by IR35 risk, supply chain compliance changes coming into force in April 2026, and a tightening of procurement scrutiny on contractor spend.
But the supply side hasn’t caught up: there’s a gap between organisations who say they deliver SoW and organisations who genuinely can. Buyers are being more selective, and rightly so.
What’s making it harder than it should be
Three forces are amplifying the pressure underneath the headline numbers.
Salary expectations have shifted faster than internal bands.
Hiring budgets tightened in 2024 and haven’t fully recovered, but candidate expectations (particularly in specialist areas) have moved on. The result is a stalemate.
Roles stay open. Offers get rejected. Employers blame the market rather than the offer. The organisations filling specialist roles consistently are benchmarking against where the market actually is, not where it was two years ago.
Sponsorship appetite has narrowed.
Post-Brexit visa complexity and rising sponsorship costs have made many organisations more cautious about international hiring.
That’s fine when domestic supply is sufficient. For most of the roles above, it isn’t – and the reluctance to sponsor is quietly removing a portion of the addressable talent pool.
The passive candidate problem has intensified.
The people you most want to hire are typically not on job boards. They’re delivering projects, being retained by their current employer, and only open to a move if the conversation is sufficiently compelling. Reaching them requires sourcing approaches that most in-house teams aren’t resourced to sustain.
The Employment Rights Act is adding a planning layer
Sitting underneath all of this is a legislative shift that’s changing how organisations think about hiring risk. The Employment Rights Act will bring some of the most significant changes to UK workplace legislation in years, including unfair dismissal protection from six months (down from two years), removal of compensation caps, expanded harassment duties, and new trade union workplace access rights.
For HR leaders and business owners, this means the cost of getting a hire wrong is materially higher in 2026 than it was in 2024. Probationary periods need rethinking. Performance management processes need tightening. The bar for evidencing fair process is being raised. None of this changes who you should hire, but it changes how seriously the quality of the hiring decision should be taken.
What this means for your roadmap
A few principles we’d offer to anyone planning hiring across the rest of 2026:
Stop treating the market as one thing.
Generalist hiring is easier. Specialist hiring isn’t. Plan resourcing, sourcing intensity, and time-to-hire assumptions at the role level, not the function level.
Front-load your specialist hires.
Engineering vacancies are already rising again, and the consensus across the recruitment market is that conditions will tighten further as confidence returns through the back half of the year. Critical specialist hires made now will land more easily than the same hires made in Q4.
Rethink the shape, not just the role.
For transformation programmes, the right question increasingly isn’t how many contractors do we need? It’s what shape of team (perm, contract, SoW) best fits this work? That framing produces better commercial and delivery outcomes than defaulting to whatever the procurement framework supports.
Take retention as seriously as recruitment.
With one in three UK workers planning to change jobs through 2026, the candidates you most need to keep are the candidates competitors most want to hire. Retention isn’t an HR problem; it’s a roadmap problem.
Get serious about candidate experience.
Two-week process gaps are losing offers. Vague job specs are deterring strong candidates. Drawn-out feedback cycles are pushing passive candidates back to their existing employers. In a market this tight in specialist areas, operational hiring discipline is competitive advantage.
The bottom line
The 2026 UK hiring market is more complex than the macro data suggests. Easier in places, materially harder in others, and quietly being reshaped by legislative changes that raise the cost of getting it wrong.
The organisations getting this right are the ones treating workforce planning as a precision activity and matching the way they source, structure, and engage talent to the actual shape of the work they need delivered.
