The centre of gravity in financial services hiring has moved up the skills ladder. In its recent review of sector shortages, the government found that recruitment in financial services was generally for Regulatory Qualification Framework (RQF) 6+ roles, rather than RQF 3 to 5 GOV.UK - Temporary Shortage List: Stage 2 report. In plain terms, RQF 6+ sits at degree level and above, while RQF 3 to 5 covers roles closer to A-level and early technical grades.
That matters for anyone staffing a KYC refresh programme. The repeatable checking work, pulling documents, matching records, flagging gaps, is exactly what agents are built to run at scale. What is left is harder to automate: deciding whether a flagged anomaly is a genuine risk, interpreting a grey-area rule, and standing behind that decision when a regulator asks. Those are judgement roles, and they map onto the higher-qualification end the data points to.
The wider labour market shows the same pattern of work changing rather than simply disappearing. Across AI-related occupations, the government projects a net change ranging from roughly 696,000 jobs in its automation scenario to 1,072,000 in its technological opportunities scenario, with replacement demand running between 3,077,000 and 3,193,000 jobs AI Skills for Life and Work: Labour market and skills projections - GOV.UK. The volume of roles to fill stays high; the content of those roles keeps moving.
Entry routes are shifting too. Apprenticeships rose from 3% of AI hires in 2020 to 19% in 2025 GOV.UK / DSIT – AI Labour Market Survey 2025 report. For compliance teams, that is a signal: you can build judgement in-house through structured routes, not only buy it ready-made. As agents absorb the routine refresh workload, the people who stay are the ones who own exceptions, model risk and the audit trail behind every call.
Start by writing the role around decisions, not tasks. If an agent runs the refresh, your job description should describe the hardest calls the person will make: when to escalate, how to read conflicting evidence, and how to document reasoning so it holds up later. Test for that directly. Give people a real redacted case with an ambiguous flag and ask them to talk through how they would resolve it and why.
Then look for people who can work alongside agents rather than against them. The strongest hires treat the agent's output as a first draft to interrogate, not an answer to accept. Prize curiosity, the instinct to ask why a record looks the way it does, and the discipline to record a clear rationale. And given how fast entry routes are changing, keep your pipeline open to apprentices and career-changers who bring sharp judgement from adjacent fields.
When the role you are filling is judgement, you want to reach a wide field quickly and focus your time on the few people worth interviewing. That is where we help. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. You get to spend your attention where it counts, on the decision-makers who will own your KYC exceptions. Start hiring with Reed.ai today.
