The wider labour market is cautious right now. The Low Pay Commission describes conditions as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment but only slight increases in redundancies, and vacancies sitting below pre-pandemic levels the Low Pay Commission Report 2025. That caution shapes how banks plan compliance headcount: teams want certainty that each hire can do the job from day one.
At the same time, demand for specialist skills has not gone away. The largest volume increase in vacancies over August to October 2025 was in the professional, scientific and technical activities sector, which rose by 5,000 the ONS Vacancies and jobs in the UK bulletin for November 2025. Financial crime and compliance work sits squarely in that specialist band, where employers compete for people who can apply judgement, not just follow a checklist.
The direction of travel matters too. Skills England names Digital among the occupations with the greatest additional employment demand between 2025 and 2030 Skills England's Assessment of priority skills to 2030. KYC roles increasingly overlap with data and digital tooling, so the people who thrive combine regulatory knowledge with comfort handling systems and structured data.
KYC hiring covers a spread of roles: onboarding analysts who verify new customers, ongoing monitoring analysts who refresh existing files, enhanced due diligence specialists who handle higher-risk cases, and quality assurance reviewers who check the work. Each needs a slightly different blend of investigation, judgement and attention to detail, so a single job title rarely captures what a team actually needs.
Two market pressures make these roles harder to fill from the usual pool. First, entry-level hiring has weakened across the board: Adzuna has seen a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT launched, with graduates facing the toughest market since 2018 techUK's analysis of entry-level and graduate jobs. Fewer junior roles today means a smaller pipeline of experienced analysts tomorrow.
Second, the routes into skilled work are changing. Apprenticeships have risen from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 the GOV.UK AI Labour Market Survey 2025. That shift signals a wider point for compliance teams: capable people are arriving through non-traditional routes, and screening only for degrees or long tenure narrows the field unnecessarily.
Start by writing down the skills, not the CV. Define what a strong analyst must be able to do: assess customer risk, read source documents critically, spot inconsistencies, escalate correctly and record decisions clearly. When you screen against demonstrable skills rather than a fixed number of years, you widen the pool without lowering the bar.
Then test for those skills directly. A short case exercise, a sample file review or a scenario on when to raise an escalation tells you far more than a job title. This matters because employers still report genuine scarcity in adjacent specialist fields: 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. Skills-first assessment helps you find capable people others overlook.
Finally, build a pipeline rather than reacting to each gap. With entry-level engineering hiring at -19% against senior hiring at -10%, a nine-percentage-point gap GOV.UK's snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK, sectors that stop training juniors face shortages later. Banks that mix experienced hires with apprentices and internal moves protect their compliance capacity for the years ahead.
We built Reed.ai to make skills-first hiring practical at speed. We search a database of 15 million people, rank a shortlist against the skills you set, and manage the process end to end so your compliance team stays focused on risk work. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you are building a KYC team, tell us the skills that matter and we will surface people who match.
