City A.M. reports that employers have slammed the brakes on hiring while they wait to see what the next government looks like. Recruiter Morgan McKinley found available jobs in London fell 5% in the second quarter compared to the first, with professional vacancies down 3% on a year ago. The British Chambers of Commerce says fewer than one in four firms plan to grow their workforce, and just over one in ten are planning cuts.
The reasons given are the ones you'd guess: a hefty tax bill, political uncertainty after the Prime Minister's resignation, and nobody wanting to commit to payroll until they know what the rules will be. So recruitment gets parked, and everyone waits.
But there's a number buried in the same research that changes the story completely.
Three quarters of firms still can't find staff
According to the BCC, nearly three quarters of companies report difficulties finding the people they need. Read that alongside the hiring freeze and you get a strange picture: businesses desperately short of people, refusing to hire people. The need hasn't gone anywhere — the confidence has.
The jobs market isn't short of demand. It's short of nerve.
That distinction matters enormously if you run a small business, because confidence is one of the few areas where you can genuinely outmanoeuvre bigger competitors. A corporate hiring freeze is a policy — it applies to every department, whatever their pipeline looks like, until someone senior says otherwise. Your hiring decision is one conversation with yourself and your accountant.
What the window actually looks like
When large employers pause recruitment, three things happen that favour whoever's still moving. Good candidates who would normally be swept up in corporate offers are suddenly available, and staying available longer. Salary expectations calm down, because there are fewer bidders in the room. And the candidates who are looking tend to be serious — people don't job-hunt in an uncertain market for fun.
None of that lasts. When the political picture settles and the big firms switch hiring back on, the queue re-forms and the price goes back up. Windows like this one tend to be measured in months, not years.
The catch: don't hire on vibes either
The point isn't 'hire now because everyone else isn't' — that's the same herd thinking in reverse. The point is that a freeze made out of nervousness isn't a strategy, and neither is a hire made out of contrarianism. What separates a smart move from a gamble is boring: knowing what the hire fully costs (it's meaningfully more than the salary once employer's National Insurance, pension contributions and kit land on top), and checking the numbers still work if trading gets tougher rather than better.
If the cautious version of your forecast can carry the wage bill, this is about as good as hiring conditions get for a small employer: motivated candidates, less competition, and rivals who've benched themselves. If the cautious version can't carry it, you've lost nothing by doing the sums — you've just made a real decision instead of an anxious one.
What a hire actually costs beyond the salary
The salary on the job advert is never the number that actually leaves the business account. In the 2026/27 tax year employer's National Insurance is charged at 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold, and pension auto-enrolment adds a minimum 3% employer contribution on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. On a £30,000 salary that's £3,750 of National Insurance and £713 of pension — £34,463, or roughly 15% on top of gross pay, before a single laptop, uniform or induction hour is accounted for. If you qualify for the Employment Allowance, up to £10,500 of employer National Insurance across your whole payroll comes back off, which for a small team can cancel that £3,750 out entirely.
That's before kit, software licences, any recruitment fee if an agency's involved, and the genuinely real cost of a manager's time spent interviewing, onboarding and correcting mistakes for the first few months while someone learns the job. None of this is a reason not to hire. It's a reason to cost the hire honestly before deciding whether the cautious version of your forecast can actually carry it — because the number that matters is never the one on the job advert.
Where the good candidates actually are right now
The candidates worth having in a window like this aren't necessarily the ones actively applying to job boards — plenty of the strongest people never got as far as updating a CV, they just stopped feeling nervous about staying put the moment their own employer went quiet on hiring and promotions. Referrals from your existing team, direct approaches through LinkedIn to people who aren't visibly job-hunting, and simply being known locally as a business that's still growing tend to outperform a job ad sitting on a board competing with hundreds of others for attention.
Notice periods for established professional roles typically run one to three months, which means the candidates moving now largely decided to look before the freeze fully set in — worth remembering when judging how 'available' someone genuinely is versus how quickly they can actually start.
A worked example
Take a small firm considering a £30,000 operations hire it's been putting off for a year. Fully loaded — National Insurance, pension, a modest kit and software allowance — that role costs closer to £36,000-£37,000 in year one than £30,000. Against a cautious forecast, if that role frees up roughly a day and a half a week of the owner's time currently spent on the exact tasks the new hire would take over, and that time is worth even a conservative day rate redirected towards client work or new business, the hire pays for itself within the first year on time saved alone, before counting anything the new person actually adds beyond that. Run the same sum with your own numbers before deciding either way — the answer is specific to the business, not a rule of thumb.
What to do this week
Cost the actual role fully — salary plus employer's National Insurance plus pension plus kit — not just the headline number you'd planned to advertise. Write down, honestly, what the cautious version of your next twelve months looks like, and check whether that forecast can carry the fully loaded cost even if trading doesn't improve. If it can, move quickly: tell your own network and existing team before posting publicly, since referral candidates in a quiet market tend to be both stronger and faster to close than a public ad competing with everyone else's caution. Windows like this one don't announce when they're closing — they just quietly aren't there any more once the political picture settles and the big firms switch hiring back on.
Either way, decide it on your numbers, not on what the headlines say everyone else is doing. Everyone else is waiting for certainty. It isn't coming — and the businesses that grasp that first tend to be the ones the others spend the next few years trying to catch.
Common questions
How do I work out the fully loaded cost of a hire?
Start with the salary, add employer's National Insurance at 15% on everything above the £5,000 secondary threshold, then add the minimum 3% employer pension contribution on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. On a £30,000 salary that is £3,750 and £713 respectively, so £34,463. Then add the items that never make it onto the spreadsheet: laptop and phone, software licences, any recruitment fee, employer's liability insurance, and the weeks of a manager's time spent interviewing, onboarding and correcting early mistakes. If you qualify for the Employment Allowance, up to £10,500 of employer National Insurance across your payroll comes back off. Do this before you agree a salary, not after.
Is hiring into a downturn just reckless?
Only if you hire on instinct rather than on numbers. The discipline is the same in either direction: write the cautious version of your next twelve months — the one where trading does not improve — and check whether it carries the fully loaded cost of the role. If it does, a quiet market is genuinely a good time to hire, because there are fewer bidders for good candidates and salary expectations are calmer. If it does not, you have lost nothing by doing the sum. What is actually reckless is either extreme held as a policy: freezing because everyone else has, or hiring because everyone else has not. Neither is a decision; both are borrowed reasoning.
What if I hire and then cannot afford to keep them?
Redundancy is lawful where the role genuinely disappears, but it costs money and takes process. Statutory redundancy pay applies only from two years' service and is calculated on age and length of service using a capped week's pay of £751 from 6 April 2026, with a maximum statutory payment of £22,530. Statutory notice is one week after a month's service, rising by a week for each complete year up to twelve. You must also consult properly and use a fair, objective selection process where more than one person does similar work — getting the process wrong is what turns an affordable redundancy into an unfair dismissal claim. Budget for the exit as part of the entry decision.
How long will it actually take to get someone started?
Longer than the hiring conversation suggests. Established professional roles typically carry one to three months' notice, so someone you agree terms with in September may not start until December. Add the time to source, shortlist and interview, and a role you decide on this month realistically lands in the business a quarter later. That gap matters when you are hiring into a window, because the conditions that made the decision look good may have moved by the time the person walks in. It also argues for referrals and direct approaches over a job ad, since the sourcing stage is where most of the avoidable delay sits, not the notice period.
Should I hire part-time or use a freelancer instead?
It is the right first move when the work is real but the volume is not yet proven. A part-time employee attracts the same obligations as a full-time one — PAYE, pension assessment once they earn over £10,000, employer's liability insurance — but at proportionally lower cost, and because employer National Insurance only bites above £5,000, a low-hours role generates proportionally less of it than a full-time one. A freelancer is more reversible again, with no notice period and no employer National Insurance, provided the relationship is genuinely self-employed rather than an employee by another name. Freelancer, then part-time, then full-time, moving up only when the workload has held steady long enough to trust.
