The engineering market is tight, and it's been tight for a while. 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list, according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology's 2025 skills research. When three in four employers can't fill the roles that matter most, every hiring decision carries more weight.
The wider tech picture is cautious but far from flat. Against a subdued 2025 economic backdrop, businesses took a careful approach to hiring, yet there were clear demand hotspots for specialist skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security, as Computer Weekly's tech recruitment outlook for 2026 reports. In other words, the market isn't short of jobs. It's short of the right people for the hardest problems.
Here's the question we keep coming back to: if specialist skills are the bottleneck, what actually separates a strong engineering hire from an average one today? More and more, the answer is how well they think and write, not just how well they code.
Modern engineering runs on written artefacts. Design docs, technical specs, pull request descriptions, incident write-ups, architecture decisions: these are the places where teams reason out loud, align and move fast. An engineer who writes a clear spec saves a dozen meetings. One who writes a vague one costs the team weeks.
Two shifts push this up the priority list. First, remote and distributed teams depend on asynchronous writing to stay in sync, so clarity on the page replaces clarity in the room. Second, AI tools now handle more of the boilerplate coding, which raises the value of the human skills around it: framing the problem, documenting intent and explaining trade-offs. Product writing is exactly that work.
The stakes are higher because people are on the move. 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026, based on Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report covering over 500 employers and 1,000 candidates. When teams turn over, the written record is what survives. Good product writing is how knowledge stays in the business when individuals leave.
Start by making the skill visible in your process. Most engineering interviews test code and system design, then ignore writing entirely. If product writing matters to you, assess it directly rather than hoping it shows up by accident.
Move quickly once you find the right person. With 79% of UK technical professionals planning to change employers in 2026 per Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, strong writers who also ship code won't sit in your pipeline for long. A slow, unclear process is the fastest way to lose them.
This is where we come in. We search a database of 15 million candidates and rank a shortlist in seconds, so you can focus your time on assessing the human skills that are hardest to screen for, like clear product writing and sharp technical reasoning. 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 engineers who can both build and explain, let us help you find them. Start today.
