September is often when hiring plans get made properly. Budgets are revisited, Q4 delivery is confirmed, and the roles that drifted through the summer either get committed to or disappear.
This year there is a harder deadline attached. A significant package of employment law changes lands during October, with more following in January. Plans made in September will run straight into them.
Eight questions worth putting to the leadership team before the quarter starts.
1. Which roles are agreed, and which are actually funded?
These are different things. A role that has leadership support but no budget line will stall at offer stage. Separate the two lists now and you avoid running a process you cannot finish.
2. What breaks first if the hire does not happen?
If every open role is a priority, none of them are. Rank by consequence rather than by who asked loudest. The role that unblocks delivery for three other people usually beats the one with the more senior sponsor.
3. Which of these are permanent roles, and which are really projects?
A defined piece of work with an end date is not always a headcount question. Some of what sits on a Q4 hiring plan is better structured as scoped delivery, and treating it as a permanent hire adds months to the timeline for no benefit.
4. Are we ready for the October changes?
From 1 October, the time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims doubles from three months to six. On 30 October, a substantial package takes effect covering trade union access and recognition, industrial action protections and strengthened harassment duties, including liability for harassment by third parties.
For most employers the practical work is governance: policies, training records, and the ability to evidence what you did to prevent something rather than how you responded to it.
5. Is our offer position current?
Salary bands set at the start of the financial year are often 12 months behind the market by Q4. If you have lost candidates at offer stage this year, benchmark before you advertise rather than after the second rejection.
6. How quickly can we actually move?
Count the real number of stages, the average gap between them, and who has to be in the room. Most processes can lose a stage without losing rigour, and speed is still the single most controllable advantage in a hiring process.
7. Who owns retention through Q4?
January is when resignations cluster. The conversations that prevent them happen in October and November, usually about progression and workload rather than pay. Someone should be accountable for having them.
8. What starts in January, and what has to begin now?
From January 2027, unfair dismissal protection is expected to apply from six months of employment rather than two years, with the compensation cap removed. That changes how probation should be structured and how quickly managers need to act on performance concerns. Roles hired in Q4 will be the first group affected.
The pattern we see every year
The businesses that come out of Q4 well are the ones that decided in September what mattered, agreed who could sign off, and then moved quickly when the right person appeared.
The ones that struggle usually made the same three mistakes: too many priorities, no delegated authority, and a process built for a market that no longer exists.
Book a Q4 planning conversation
Intec Select, Insight Select and Inscope Select cover technology, commercial and scoped delivery between them, which means we can look at a whole plan rather than one role at a time.
If you are shaping Q4 now, we are happy to sit down and work through it with you.
