Hiring in financial services has moved up the qualification ladder. Recruitment was generally for Regulatory Qualification Framework (RQF) 6+ roles, rather than RQF 3 to 5, according to GOV.UK's Temporary Shortage List Stage 2 report. That tells you something simple but important: the roles getting hardest to fill are senior, technical and regulated, not entry level.
When the brief sits that high up the ladder, every step of the hiring process carries more weight. A wrong call on an RQF 6+ role is expensive in time and trust. So the questions a hiring team asks have changed too. It is no longer enough to know who a tool recommends. You need to know why, and you need to be able to show your working to a reviewer, a compliance lead or a regulator.
The skills picture is shifting fast, and apprenticeships are part of the answer. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025, according to the GOV.UK and DSIT AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. Finance firms are building AI and data capability in-house rather than buying it all in, and that changes the kind of person they hire for.
Some shortages are easing, but the hard ones stay hard. The proportion of employers struggling to fill vacancies has declined, yet a comparison in the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report showed 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy. For regulated finance teams, security and compliance skills sit right next to the technical skills, and both are competitive to win.
This is where audit evidence enters the brief. When you hire for a senior, regulated role, and when an AI agent helps you screen and shortlist, you need a record of how each decision was reached. Which criteria were weighted, which candidates were surfaced and why, and what a human changed. That record is the evidence.
Start with a brief that names the standard, not just the skills. For RQF 6+ roles, as noted in the Temporary Shortage List Stage 2 report, write the qualification level into the brief from day one so screening is consistent and defensible.
Then set out, before you start, what good evidence looks like. Three habits help:
Build your talent pipeline for the roles that stay hard, like the cyber and security skills behind that 70% hard-to-fill figure in the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. And treat apprenticeships as a real route in, given the rise from 3% to 19% of AI hires noted in the GOV.UK and DSIT survey. Hiring well here is as much about process you can show as people you can reach.
A good AI agent does two jobs at once in a regulated sector: it reaches the right people quickly, and it leaves a record you can check. We search a database of 15 million candidates, rank a shortlist in seconds and record how each match was made, so a human can review the evidence before anyone moves forward. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. Want to see the audit trail for yourself? Start your first search with us today.
