The wider picture is cautious. The current UK labour market is best described 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. For hiring managers that sounds like a challenge, but it's also an opening: when fewer employers are actively recruiting, a bank that moves quickly and clearly stands out to the people it wants.
There are still clear demand hotspots. The largest volume increase in vacancies in August to October 2025 came in the professional, scientific and technical activities sector, which rose by 5,000 according to the ONS vacancies bulletin for November 2025. Financial services sits close to that professional-services engine, which tells us competition for skilled, client-facing people has not gone away. Monthly market trackers are worth watching too, such as the KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs, to read the direction of travel before you open a role.
A relationship manager is not a single, standardised job. The person you need to grow a commercial lending book looks different from the person managing high-net-worth private clients or SME portfolios. Each blends credit judgement, commercial development and a book of trusted client relationships that takes years to build. That mix is scarce, and it rarely arrives job-hunting in an open market.
Skills scarcity is a familiar story across skilled UK sectors. In cyber security, for example, 70% of firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy in the AI Labour Market Survey 2025. Banking faces the same dynamic for relationship talent: the strongest people are usually employed, performing well and not applying to adverts. That changes how you hire. You're often competing for someone who has to be persuaded to move, not simply screened from a pile of applications.
Start with the client, not the job title. Define the role by the outcomes it owns: which client segment, what size of portfolio, what growth targets and what credit responsibility. A precise brief lets you assess for the right blend of commercial instinct, risk awareness and relationship skill, and it stops you defaulting to a generic advert that the best people will scroll past.
Then move quickly and treat people with respect. In a 'low hire, low fire' market as the Low Pay Commission describes it, strong relationship managers weigh a move carefully, and a slow, vague process is the fastest way to lose them. Keep stages short, give clear feedback, and make the first conversation about their clients and their ambitions rather than a checklist. Look beyond the resident talent pool where the skills are genuinely rare, and build a longer-term pipeline so you're not starting cold every time a portfolio opens up.
This is where we come in. We search a database of 15 million candidates to find people with the client-facing and credit experience mid-sized banks need, including those who aren't actively applying. We rank a shortlist in under 30 seconds, contact matched people in under a minute and can have an interview booked in under three minutes, so your process keeps pace with the person you're trying to win. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. That fee is about one thing: finding the right relationship manager and handling the whole process for you. Ready to open your next role with Reed.ai? Let's find your next relationship manager.
