The picture is mixed, and that is exactly why instinct alone falls short. The wider labour market is best described as 'low hire, low fire', with weaker recruitment but only slight increases in redundancies, and vacancies dropping below pre-pandemic levels Low Pay Commission Report 2025, GOV.UK. Early estimates for April to June 2026 suggest a decrease of 7,000 vacancies to 712,000, with professional, scientific and technical activities among the largest fallers ONS - Vacancies and jobs in the UK.
But a cooling headline hides the hotspots. Businesses took a cautious approach to hiring through a subdued 2025, yet there were clear demand hotspots for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly (tech recruitment outlook 2026). So the question is not whether to hire, but where the real pressure sits on your team.
Start with the roles the market tells you are hardest to fill. IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, a group of around 193,000 workers, are in critical demand, with three out of five indicators flagged as critical in 2025 Occupations in demand 2025, Explore Education Statistics, GOV.UK. On the employer side, 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
Retention is the other half of the signal. Some 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026, based on a survey of over 500 employers and 1,000 people looking for work Engineering and Technology Jobs (IET) / Rise Technical. That churn is a demand signal in itself: if a large share of your team is open to moving, your headcount plan has to account for backfill, not just growth.
Watch the shape of demand by seniority too. In engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a nine-percentage-point gap GOV.UK - A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK. That gap is a signal about where the market is competing hardest, and where you can build pipeline that others are ignoring.
Read the signals before you write the job description. The largest volume increase in vacancies in August to October 2025 was in professional, scientific and technical activities, which rose by 5,000 ONS – Vacancies and jobs in the UK: November 2025. Pair that external movement with your own internal data: delivery velocity, on-call load, open tickets per engineer and where deadlines keep slipping. Those are the numbers that tell you which role to open next.
Then hire to the gap, not the title. Define the specific problem a new engineer solves, map it to the skills in shortest supply, and set out the level you actually need. A clear signal-led brief beats a generic 'we need another developer' every time, because it narrows the search and speeds up the decision.
Once your signals tell you which role to open, we turn that brief into a shortlist fast. We search 15 million candidates to find people who match your specific requirement, contact matched candidates in under a minute and can book an interview in under three minutes. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. Ready to hire to the signal? Tell us the role and we will build your shortlist today.
