The wider UK labour market sets the backdrop. The Low Pay Commission describes today's 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's 2025 report. That means fewer roles are moving, and the ones that do move matter more.
There are still pockets of movement, though. The largest volume increase in vacancies recently came in professional, scientific and technical activities, up by 5,000 in August to October 2025 according to the ONS vacancies bulletin for November 2025. Insurance sits inside that professional services grouping. So when a large loss claims seat opens, you're competing for a narrow pool of experienced people in a market where they aren't moving often.
The practical takeaway: a cautious market rewards a sharp, fast process. When strong people do become available, the employer who assesses well and moves quickly tends to win them.
Large loss is the complex end of claims: high-value property, casualty, liability, business interruption, catastrophe and subsidence work. The roles include large loss adjusters, complex claims handlers, technical claims managers, and specialist teams handling litigated or disputed files. What they share is exposure: a single decision can carry a six or seven-figure reserve.
That's why judgement outranks tenure. Experience matters, but two people with the same years on their CV can reason very differently. The person you want reads a complex file, spots the coverage question early, sets a defensible reserve, and knows when to instruct experts or escalate. Those are reasoning skills, and they show up in how someone works through a problem, not in a job title.
The trend across professional sectors is a shift toward skills and evidence over headcount and pedigree. In the entry-level end of the market, hiring has fallen and senior roles hold up better, leaving a nine-percentage-point gap in engineering, for example per GOV.UK's snapshot of entry-level hiring. For claims, that same pattern means the experienced, judgement-heavy roles are the ones employers protect and compete hardest for.
Start by defining the judgement you actually need. Write down the decisions this person will make in their first six months: reserving calls, coverage questions, when to litigate, how to handle a difficult policyholder or broker. That list becomes your assessment, not a generic competency framework.
Then test reasoning directly. A worked scenario beats a CV read. Hand a candidate a redacted large loss file or a short brief, and ask how they'd approach it: what they'd reserve, what they'd want to know next, where the risk sits, when they'd escalate. You're not marking the 'right' answer. You're watching how they think, what they ask, and how they handle ambiguity.
Speed and structure work together. In a low-hire market, the employers who lose good people are usually the ones with slow, vague processes as the Low Pay Commission's picture of subdued recruitment suggests. A tight, evidence-based process respects the person's time and gives you a decision you can stand behind.
We built Reed.ai to handle recruitment end to end while you focus on assessing judgement. We search a database of 15 million people, surface a ranked shortlist for a large loss role, and manage the process from first contact through to a booked interview. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you're hiring for complex claims, tell us the judgement you need and we'll get started today.
