It's competitive, and the pressure sits squarely on specialist roles. In 2025, 76% of engineering employers struggled to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list, according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology. That tells you something important: when a role needs deep, specific expertise, the shortage bites hardest.
Security sits right in that squeeze. GOV.UK's 2025 cyber security skills research puts the UK cyber security workforce at around 143,000 people, with growth moderately accelerating from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024. The pool is expanding, but slowly, and demand hasn't waited for it to catch up.
The wider market backs this up. Against a subdued 2025 economic backdrop, businesses took a cautious approach to hiring, but there were demand hotspots for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security, Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026 reports. So even in a careful market, security is one of the areas where employers keep competing hard.
Because the people you want are already working, and plenty of employers are chasing them. A comparison with the Cyber Security Skills 2024 report showed 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy, the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 on GOV.UK found. When most firms in a field are struggling to fill roles, the bottleneck isn't your advert, it's the supply.
There's a second dynamic that matters for a lean team. A security engineer often spans several disciplines at once: cloud, application security, incident response, compliance. When you only have the headcount for one hire, the temptation is to write a role that asks for all of it. That widens your search and slows everything down, right when you need speed.
And a lean team feels every week of delay. The people who'd normally run the hiring process are the same people holding the security work together. So the process has to be sharp, or it stalls.
Start by narrowing the role to the one problem you most need solved. Rank your must-haves against your nice-to-haves, and be honest about which skills you can develop on the job. Given that technical and specialist skills are the hardest to find, per the IET's 2025 engineering skills research, protect the few requirements that truly can't be learned quickly and let the rest flex.
Speed is a strategy here, not a nicety. When 70% of cyber firms report at least one hard-to-fill vacancy, as the AI Labour Market Survey 2025 notes, the employer who moves first and communicates clearly tends to win the person. A lean team can actually have an edge: fewer approvers means quicker decisions, if you design for it.
We take the parts a stretched team can't spare time for and handle them end to end. We search 15 million candidates to find people who match your scoped role, rank a shortlist in under 30 seconds, and keep the process moving so your engineers only step in when it counts. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell us what your role needs today, and we'll get started.
