I spend most of my time in honest conversations with founders, MDs, hiring managers and C-suite leaders across events and experiential.
When you sit in enough of those rooms, patterns start to emerge.
Q4 didn’t slow down. It became more deliberate. More strategic. More outcome focused.
Here’s what I’m seeing and what I think is coming next.
Trend 1: If You Don’t Have the Salary, Change the Shape of the Role
The post-pandemic salary spike is over.
Employers aren’t throwing £15–20k pay jumps at people anymore. And candidates aren’t moving for them either.
Culture, flexibility, benefits and values are driving decisions.
Everyone wants someone “ready to go”. But if they’re ready to go, they’re already being paid for it.
If you don’t have the budget, you need to offer something smarter than money you don’t have.
One model gaining traction is non-pro-rata reduced days — particularly in sales and output-driven roles.
If you’ve got £45–50k to spend, consider three or four days a week but pay the full salary. Suddenly you attract experienced people who wouldn’t normally look at the role. And you don’t have to oversee them constantly.
We’re stuck on five days because that’s how it’s always been.
The market is quietly proving there’s a better way.
Trend 2: Hiring Hasn’t Stopped — It’s Just Slowed Down (On Purpose)
The market hasn’t frozen.
What’s changed is the level of scrutiny.
Quality has overtaken speed.
Senior hires are taking longer. Employers are asking deeper, measurable questions. Due diligence is heavier. There are more stages, more scenario testing, more stakeholder meetings.
It might add a week or two to the process.
But bad hires are expensive and disruptive.
The upside is retention. People are joining because there’s genuine alignment, not because the interview felt good on the day.
It’s frustrating in the short term.
But it’s building stronger teams long term.
Trend 3: Sales Hiring Is Dominating — But Strategy Matters More Than Ever
As businesses plan for 2026, sales roles are dominating conversations.
Sales directors. Commercial leads. Client development hires.
But expectations are often misaligned.
Too many businesses expect someone to walk in and magically deliver numbers without a plan.
Sales isn’t a knee-jerk fix. It’s a strategy.
If you don’t already have a clear sales function, hire someone senior enough to build one with a proposition, positioning, process and pipeline, not just someone to “hit the phones”.
Timing matters too.
Bringing someone in mid-cycle gives them time to bed in. Starting someone in January and expecting instant results makes no commercial sense.
My Forecasts for 2026
1: The 9-to-5 Debate Will Finally Evolve
I’ve said before that senior leaders being around people matters.
But rigid attendance rules for everyone? That’s starting to feel outdated.
The next generation has watched this industry burn people out. Long hours. Missed birthdays. Exhaustion. Then leaders complaining about engagement.
It’s not that they don’t want to work.
They want work to make sense.
The employers making progress will stop counting hours and start measuring output.
That doesn’t mean chaos. You can’t run a business with 99 people on 99 different arrangements.
But you can build clear, role-based frameworks that reflect reality.
An office full of people who can’t leave isn’t culture.
It’s captivity.
2: Pay Will Reflect Location and Office Attendance
This one raises eyebrows.
But it’s already happening quietly.
Pay has always been influenced by geography, commuting costs and local economies even when just didn’t say it out loud.
When employees relocate for lifestyle reasons and reduce office attendance, salary conversations naturally evolve. Not because capability has changed. But because context has.
Handled transparently, with clear salary bands and logic, this becomes a grown-up conversation about flexibility and fairness.
Handled emotionally or inconsistently, it destroys trust quickly.
Execution is everything.
3: Timesheets and Day Rates Will Start to Look Dated
AI is accelerating delivery.
If something can be delivered faster, to a high standard, why are we treating that as a problem?
The value hasn’t dropped just because the timesheet shows fewer hours.
The shift is towards outcomes.
What’s being delivered? By when? What does “good” look like?
Agencies that evolve their commercial models around value rather than time will navigate 2026 more easily.
Those clinging to timesheets as their main measure of value will spend more time arguing about fairness than building better businesses.
The smart agencies will move on.
4: Agencies Will Specialise Again
Ask ten agencies what they do and you’ll hear the same answer.
“We’re integrated. We do everything.”
Buyers are tired of that.
They want to know one thing: Why you? What are you genuinely best at?
In 2026, agencies with a clear point of view will stand out.
That might mean specialising by sector, audience, format or capability.
But it needs to be real.
Specialisation reduces client risk. It builds confidence.
Generalists get compared on price.
Specialists get chosen for expertise.
Becoming a specialist recruiter cost me opportunities short term.
But it built long-term trust.
In Summary
Q4 was defined by smarter trade-offs. Slower but stronger hiring decisions. A focus on outcomes over hours.
This isn’t a market in retreat.
It’s a market growing up.
And the forward-thinking employers who adapt will win.
