After nearly four years of decline, permanent placements across the UK rose in August. If you have been hiring through that period you will know how long it has felt.
It is a real turn and worth marking. It is also, on its own, a misleading headline — because almost nothing about this recovery is evenly spread.
The turn is real, but it is narrow
Permanent placements rose in London and the Midlands in August. They fell in the South and the North of England.
Temporary billings tell a different regional story again. Growth there was led by the North of England, while the Midlands was the only monitored English region to record a fall.
In Scotland, permanent placements are still falling — though at the slowest rate in three months — and temporary billings fell at their sharpest rate since February 2023.
So “the market is turning” is true nationally, and wrong in at least half the country. If you hire in one region, the national number is close to useless to you.
Demand is still falling — this is a recovery from a low base
Vacancies fell in August for the thirty-fourth consecutive month. The ONS puts the UK vacancy count at 707,000, down 2.8% on the year — the lowest in over five years and, excluding the pandemic period, the lowest since late 2014.
Two sectors bucked it. Permanent vacancies rose in Engineering and in Accounting & Financial, and fell in the other eight categories monitored, with the steepest reductions in Retail and Hotel & Catering.
Demand for temporary staff held up better, rising in four of the ten sectors, led by Blue Collar and IT & Computing.
Underneath that, the public sector is the clearer drag. Demand for both permanent and temporary workers there declined again, and faster than in July. Private sector permanent demand, by contrast, stabilised — which is the more useful signal if you are a commercial employer.
More candidates and higher salaries, at the same time
Candidate availability grew again in August, at the sharpest rate in three months. Recruiters put it down to redundancies, fewer opportunities and concern about job security, with the North of England seeing the sharpest rise.
And yet starting salaries rose at their quickest pace since January, with the strongest inflation in the South of England. Temporary pay rates rose for the ninth month running, led by the Midlands.
That is not a contradiction. It is the defining feature of this market. There are more people available and fewer roles — and the specific people who are genuinely good at the job are still scarce enough to command more money.
That shows up in our own book, too. Comparing our first five years on the placement register with the last five complete years, the average fee per placement is up by about a third. Fees track salary, so that is the same story from a different angle — and it is fifteen years of our own data rather than a survey.
I would not read all of it as pure market inflation. Our own mix has moved more senior over that period and that accounts for part of it. But the direction is not in doubt, and it points the same way the national numbers do.
The split that matters if you hire salespeople
Each month the panel is asked which skills are in short supply and which are in excess. Here is August, filtered to commercial and sales roles:
| In short supply | In excess supply |
|---|---|
| Sales | Business Development |
| Field Sales | Marketing |
| Technical Sales | C-Suite |
| IT Software Sales | Directors |
| Sales (International) | Managing Director |
| Sales Negotiators | Senior Management |
| New Home Sales | Human Resources |
| Product Managers | Project Managers |
Read that twice. The people who carry a number are hard to find. The people who manage the people who carry a number are not.
That matches what I am seeing on my own desk, and the two numbers I would put next to it are these. Applications per executive search are up somewhere between a quarter and a third on this time last year. A good AE search still takes me one to two weeks.
Which is the whole story, really. The abundant roles bury you in CVs. The scarce ones get filled by knowing where the people already are — not by advertising harder.
One caveat, and it is the report’s own: a skill can appear on both lists because supply varies by region. Treat it as direction of travel rather than gospel.
“The job market is starting to power up again after employers had permanent hiring on the standby button for the past four years. It is encouraging that temporary recruitment is now complementing rather than replacing permanent hiring.”
Maxine Bligh, Interim Chief Executive, Recruitment & Employment Confederation
What I would do differently if I were hiring this month
Stop reading the national numbers. The regional gap is wide enough this month that a national average will actively mislead you. If you are hiring in the South or the North, the picture on the ground is harder than the headline suggests.
Do not mistake volume for quality. You will get more applications than you did a year ago, particularly on senior roles. That is availability rising, not suitability rising, and the two are not related.
Benchmark the salary again. Pay is rising fastest for exactly the profiles that are hardest to find. A range set in the spring is probably wrong now, and in the South it is probably wrong by more.
Use temporary and contract properly. Temporary billings have now grown for five straight months while permanent has only just turned. If you need capacity before you need commitment, that route is working better than it has in years.
Entry level is where you have leverage. Youth unemployment sits at 14.6% for 18 to 24 year olds, close to an eleven-and-a-half year high, while every other age group is at or near a multi-year low. If you have the management capacity to bring people through, the supply has not been this good in a decade.
What I am watching next month
The Budget. The REC has been vocal about wanting the Autumn Budget to give employers the confidence to hire. Whether it does will show up in this data quickly.
Whether the rise holds. One month is not a trend. A second consecutive rise in permanent placements would be.
Whether the regional gap narrows. A recovery running through London and the Midlands only is a different story from a national one, and it changes where the pressure on salaries goes next.
About this tracker
The Sales Hiring Tracker is published monthly by Sales Recruitment Agency, covering hiring conditions across the UK sales market. We contribute to the KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs panel, which is compiled from responses from around 400 UK recruitment and employment consultancies.
Sources: KPMG and REC, UK Report on Jobs, compiled by S&P Global, September 2026; S&P Global UK Services PMI; Office for National Statistics. Survey data collected 12–24 August 2026.
Written by Ian Harwood. Sales Recruitment Agency is a trading brand of H2 International Ltd (11968625).
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