The picture is cautious but far from flat. Against a subdued economic backdrop, businesses took a careful approach to hiring through 2025, yet clear demand hotspots remain for specialist skills in AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security, according to Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026. So the money and the roles are moving towards depth, not breadth.
Zoom out and the wider market is what the Low Pay Commission's 2025 report calls 'low hire, low fire': weaker recruitment, only slight increases in redundancies, and vacancies below pre-pandemic levels. The ONS Vacancies and jobs bulletin shows total vacancies fell to 712,000 in April to June 2026, with the largest quarterly drop in professional, scientific and technical activities, the group that houses most software work. There were 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy over the same period.
That tighter market makes the quality of each hire matter more. When you are filling fewer roles, getting each one right is the whole game.
Demand is concentrating around AI-adjacent work. Accenture data reported by The Register shows demand for AI skills rose nearly 200% in a year, with London accounting for 80% of AI-related postings and nearly two-thirds of all UK technology vacancies. For front-end teams, that means people who can build interfaces on top of AI features, data-rich dashboards and complex enterprise apps are the ones employers chase hardest.
At the same time, the entry-level end has thinned out sharply. techUK reports Adzuna figures showing a 30% drop in UK entry-level postings since ChatGPT launched, and The Register cites the Institute of Student Employers on UK tech graduate roles falling 46% in a year, with a further 53% drop projected. Yet the long-term signal points the other way: Skills England's assessment of priority skills to 2030 puts digital occupations among those with the greatest additional employment demand this decade, and its 2026 annual skills report lists digital roles among priority occupations expected to keep growing strongly.
There is also a shift in how people enter these careers. The DSIT AI Labour Market Survey 2025 shows apprenticeships rose from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025. Skills routes are widening, even as the traditional graduate funnel narrows.
Because front-end frameworks change quickly, and a job advert built around a named stack screens out strong engineers who simply learned a different tool. A developer who understands state management, accessibility, performance and component design can move between frameworks in weeks. The underlying skill is what lasts; the library name on their CV is a snapshot.
This matters more when talent is scarce in the areas you actually need. Hard-to-fill roles are still real in specialist fields: a comparison in the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 noted that 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy. If you insist on an exact framework match, you shrink an already small pool for no good reason.
Skills-first hiring also opens the door to the widening routes into tech. With apprenticeships and non-traditional backgrounds now feeding the pipeline, the person who can prove they solve problems well may never have held the exact job title you wrote down.
Start with the work, not the tool. Write a short list of the problems this person will solve in their first six months, then assess against those. A realistic task, a code review conversation or a walk-through of past work tells you far more than a keyword-matched CV.
Speed and consistency help too. In a low-hire market, the offer that lands is often the one that reaches the right person first and keeps the process clear from the start.
The right tool searches a database of 15 million people and ranks a shortlist on the skills the role actually needs, so a different framework on the CV never hides a strong engineer. 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.
