The picture is cautious. Permanent staff appointments fell at the quickest rate in four months at the end of 2025, extending the downturn to 39 consecutive months, according to the KPMG and REC Report on Jobs. That's a long stretch of weak employer confidence and rising costs, and financial services firms feel it as much as anyone.
It isn't all decline, though. The largest volume increase in vacancies between August and October 2025 came in the professional, scientific and technical activities sector, which rose by 5,000, the ONS reported in November 2025. Demand is still there for the right skills. The question for finance employers is where that demand is hardest to meet, and how much each hire really costs to source.
AI skills are spreading fast through data-heavy work, which is exactly where financial services lives. The share of UK job postings mentioning AI is now highest in data and analytics at 46.1%, Indeed Hiring Lab's 2026 UK report found. For risk, pricing, fraud and compliance teams, those data and analytics people are the ones everyone's chasing.
The talent pipeline is shifting underneath, too. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025, according to the DSIT AI Labour Market Survey 2025. At the same time, Adzuna has seen a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT launched, with graduates facing their toughest market since 2018, techUK reports. If your early-careers and skilled hires are coming from different routes than they did three years ago, you need to know which routes are working.
Start with attribution. If you can't say which source produced a hire, you can't repeat success or cut what's failing. Track every applicant back to its origin: job board, referral, search, direct approach. Then look at quality, not just volume, because a channel that floods you with mismatched applications costs more in screening time than it saves in fees.
Move quickly on scarce skills. With GenAI roles still a small slice of postings, at 0.5% of all UK adverts as of end-May 2025 per Indeed Hiring Lab's mid-year update, the strongest data and analytics people don't stay on the market long. Speed to contact and a clean, fast interview process win those hires. And keep your sourcing honest: when you measure attribution properly, you often find your best people came from places you under-invested in.
We built Reed.ai to make attribution and speed work together. It searches a database of 15 million candidates, ranks a shortlist in seconds and contacts matched people in under a minute, so you can see what's actually delivering hires rather than guessing. You pay 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, against the typical 15 to 25% agency fee. Try it on your next finance role and see which sources truly earn their place.
