Demand for specialist skills is concentrated, not spread evenly. Against a subdued 2025 economic backdrop, businesses took a cautious approach to hiring, but there were clear demand hotspots for specialist tech skills including AI, data, enterprise applications and cyber security Computer Weekly (tech recruitment outlook 2026). A fraud strategist sits right in the middle of that mix: part data, part risk, part cyber.
The talent pool is also tighter than the headcount suggests. There are approximately 143,000 individuals in the UK cyber security workforce, with growth moderately accelerating from 2% in 2022 to 5% in 2024 Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2025 - GOV.UK. Reading your open roles against that backdrop tells you how hard a first fraud hire will be to fill, and how precise your brief needs to be.
Start with the roles you already have open, then compare them to what the market is paying attention to. Hard-to-fill vacancies remain common in this space: a comparison with the Cyber Security Skills 2024 report showed 70% of cyber firms reported at least one hard-to-fill vacancy AI Labour Market Survey 2025 (Gardiner & Theobald), GOV.UK / publishing.service.gov.uk. If your open roles already cluster around risk and data, a fraud strategist may overlap more than you think.
Seniority matters too. In the financial services sector, recruitment was generally for Regulatory Qualification Framework (RQF) 6+ roles, rather than RQF 3 to 5 GOV.UK - Temporary Shortage List: Stage 2 report. A first fraud strategist is a senior, degree-level shaped hire, so scope the role as a decision-maker rather than an analyst you can backfill later.
Read every open role as a signal. If three of your live vacancies touch fraud, chargebacks or transaction monitoring, your first strategist needs to own that whole surface, not just one slice of it. Write down what your current team cannot cover today, then build the brief around those gaps rather than a generic job title.
Be specific about outcomes. Define what good looks like when the person first starts, which systems they inherit, and who they report to. A tight brief shortlists faster and stops you interviewing people who were never the right fit. It also helps you decide whether you need one senior strategist now or a smaller role plus tooling.
Once your brief is clear, we match it against a database of 15 million candidates and surface a ranked shortlist in under 30 seconds, so you can see who is genuinely available for a senior fraud role. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. If you are scoping your first fraud strategist, tell us the brief and we will start the search with Reed.ai.
