The wider UK hiring market is steadier than it has been in a long time. Permanent placements have finally stabilised, ending a decline that ran for 45 months since Liz Truss's premiership, while temporary billings rose for a fourth consecutive month, according to the REC and KPMG Report on Jobs compiled by S&P Global. For financial-services employers, that shift matters: a more stable market means you can plan hiring with more confidence, and it puts a premium on moving quickly when the right person appears.
At the same time, people are on the move. Across UK technical professions, 79% plan to change employers in 2026, according to Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, which surveyed over 500 employers and 1,000 candidates. That appetite to switch is a warning for finance teams who rely on scarce skills. If your best people are weighing up their options, keeping them often means giving them somewhere new to go inside the business.
Automation and digitalisation are reshaping what skills firms actually need. Six in ten (59%) employers cite automation and half (50%) cite wider digitalisation as the trends changing jobs and skills needs, while 74% expect demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030, according to Make UK's 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap report. In financial services, that points to more demand for analysis, judgement and problem-solving, and less for repeatable processing work that software now handles.
The response is increasingly internal. Some 40% of employers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, a figure that rises for firms with more than 1,000 employees, according to Make UK's Executive Survey 2026. For large finance businesses with deep benches of talent, redeployment is becoming the default: move a known, trusted person into a reshaped role rather than start every search from scratch.
Start by looking in before you look out. With 40% of employers planning to upskill and redeploy existing staff as automation changes the work, according to Make UK's Executive Survey 2026, your next hire for a reshaped role may already sit two desks away. Map the cognitive and meta-cognitive skills you will need by 2030, which 74% of employers expect to grow in demand, according to Make UK's 2030 Skills report, then match them against the people you already have.
Then move fast when you do go to market. With 79% of UK technical professionals planning to change employers in 2026, according to Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, good people rarely stay available for long. The firms that win are the ones that respond quickly, keep the process simple and spend their time on judgement and fit rather than admin. That is exactly where AI agents help: they absorb the scheduling, screening and chasing, so your team can focus on the conversations that decide a hire.
That is where we come in. Reed.ai searches a database of 15 million candidates and handles recruitment end to end, from a ranked shortlist to a booked interview, so your team can spend its time deciding who is right rather than running the process. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you want to fill reshaped finance roles faster while keeping your best people moving internally, talk to us today.
