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 75% 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.
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.
