The wider UK labour market is cautious. The Low Pay Commission describes it as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment, only slight rises in redundancies, and vacancies sitting below pre-pandemic levels Low Pay Commission Report 2025, GOV.UK. That backdrop makes it easy to assume hiring has stalled everywhere. It hasn't.
Specialist demand is holding up in pockets. The ONS found the largest volume increase in vacancies from August to October 2025 was in professional, scientific and technical activities, up by 5,000 ONS – Vacancies and jobs in the UK: November 2025. Financial services sits close to that trend: when regulation raises the bar, firms need more regulated, technical and professional roles to meet it.
Consumer Duty is one of the clearest drivers. It asks firms to evidence good outcomes for customers across products, price and value, understanding, and support. Proving that continuously, not just at launch, needs people. So while overall recruitment is subdued, the demand for compliance and risk skills in financial services stays resilient.
The duty reshapes what firms hire for. It's less about box-ticking and more about ongoing monitoring, data and customer-outcome analysis. That shifts demand toward roles that can gather evidence, spot harm early and act on it.
Data skills matter more than ever here, and that puts financial services in competition with other sectors chasing the same people. Demand for AI skills in the UK rose nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for around 80% of AI-related job postings The Register (Accenture data). Compliance monitoring increasingly leans on that same analytical talent.
There's a supply squeeze at the entry level too. Adzuna recorded a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT launched, with graduates facing the toughest market since 2018 techUK – What's actually happening with entry-level and graduate jobs?. Fewer junior openings across the economy means firms must think harder about how they build a future compliance pipeline, not just fill senior gaps.
Start with the outcome, not the job title. Consumer Duty is about evidence, so define what good looks like for each role: the outcomes it protects, the data it owns, the decisions it can make. A crisp brief attracts the right people and speeds up every stage after it.
Then widen the net. With specialist skills scarce and hotspots concentrated by location, the best hires aren't always actively looking. Reaching people who match on skills and regulatory experience, rather than only those who apply, is what closes hard-to-fill roles. That matters in fields where most firms report at least one hard-to-fill vacancy, as the cyber sector has shown AI Labour Market Survey 2025 (Gardiner & Theobald), GOV.UK / publishing.service.gov.uk.
Move quickly and stay fair. In a low-hire market, strong people get snapped up, so a clear process with fast, structured interviews wins. And build the pipeline early: growing your own analysts and compliance staff protects you against the entry-level squeeze the wider economy is feeling.
Reed.ai searches a database of 15 million candidates to find people who match your compliance brief on skills and regulatory experience, then ranks a shortlist and manages the process end to end. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. That's the value of finding the right person for a role Consumer Duty makes too important to get wrong.
