Chronic and widespread recruitment difficulties continue to plague UK employers, leaving many unable to find the people they need despite low vacancy levels in the economy. The answer isn’t always more hiring, but a sharper focus on the skills you need, the talent already available, and where external expertise can close the gap.
The UK recruitment market looks quieter than it did a few years ago, yet finding the right people remains difficult. Vacancies in the UK fell to 707,000 in May to July 2026, 10.3% below pre-pandemic levels. Despite this, almost a third of employers still report hard-to-fill vacancies, while 14% expect significant recruitment difficulties over the next six months.
So why can hiring still feel like hard work when demand has cooled, and what can you do about it?
The Problem Isn’t Simply a Lack of Candidates
The latest CIPD Labour Market Outlook shows only 62% of employers plan to recruit during the next three months. Most intend to maintain staffing levels rather than expand them, with private sector recruitment intentions sitting at 57%.
This shows a cautious market rather than a hiring boom. You may not face a problem attracting applicants, but finding people with the right qualifications, skills and experience to fill the role can be a challenge. According to the Employer Skills Survey, around 37% of all vacancies in 2024 were hard to fill, with 27% classed as skill shortage vacancies(SSVs).
Skills England also highlights future skills shortages unless skills supply continues to grow substantially. For employers, waiting for the market to produce the right candidate isn’t a strategy. You need a clearer view of the skills your business will require and where those capabilities can come from.
Not Knowing What You Need Makes It Harder to Fill Gaps
It’s easy to treat a hard-to-fill role as a recruitment problem, but sometimes the vacancy is only the visible part of the issue. One common barrier preventing organisations from closing skill gaps is poor-quality or insufficient data around current and future skill needs.
The CIPD notes that only 38% of employers collect data to identify skills gaps within their organisation, whilst less than a third (31%) use data to inform future skill requirements. Such poor skills forecasting presents a strategic risk that results in less effective talent strategies.
Before you start recruiting, ask what the business needs this person to achieve. What needs to change? What problems will they inherit? What decisions will they need to make? What experience will help them deliver quickly? Such questions offer a much stronger candidate profile than a list of responsibilities.
How Can You Address Skill Shortages?
Make Training and Professional Development Investments
Employees want more than a paycheck from employers, making it vital to offer continuous training and development to attract and retain top talent. Many organisations are increasingly developing skills internally as competition for talent remains high.
Build A Culture of Learning in Your Business
Encourage staff to pursue continuous learning and provide them with the time and resources to do so. This is a durable way of building workforce resilience, and it allows you to reskill and upskill internal talent that already shares the commitment and values to your business goals.
Identifying the skills you need for future roles and mapping them against the competencies of the employees you already have makes you well positioned to avoid future skill shortages.
Implement Effective Workplace Planning
Be proactive in identifying the skills you need now and in the future. This can be the difference between reacting to and preventing a skills shortage. Technology can support you by looking more predictively at the workforce you’ll need and making sure you’ve got the right skills next month or next year.
With AI and analytics, you can optimise step by step and make cost savings while getting better people with better skills at exactly the right time.
Offer Vocations and Apprenticeships
Vocational programs and apprenticeships make it easier to build a talent pipeline from the ground up, and you may even benefit from government incentives as a result. For example, from 1 August 2026, the government will fund 100% of the apprenticeship training and assessment costs (up to the funding band maximum) for those apprentices who are aged between 16 and 24 years old.
Novo’s Perspective
Professional development has moved beyond being an employee benefit to a strategy that can help you compete for talent, retain high performers and develop the people who could lead your organisation into the future. It can also reduce your reliance on external recruitment and help you respond faster when your skills requirements change.
At Novo Executive, we believe the strongest professional development strategies start with a business question. What capabilities will you need, and who can develop them?
