Why Hiring for ‘Hard’ Roles Is Failing (And What Strategic Workforce Planning Has to Do With It)

UK vacancies have fallen to 707,000, the lowest level since early 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics. On the face of it, that should make hiring easier. More people looking, fewer roles competing for them, a buyer’s market for employers who’ve spent years struggling to fill seats.

And yet a third of employers still report vacancies they can’t fill, as evidenced by the CIPD in its Spring 2026 Labour Market Outlook, drawn from more than 2,000 employers across every sector and size. So if there are more candidates available than at any point in five years, why are the roles that matter most to your business still sitting empty?

The answer lies in how hiring for hard roles has fundamentally changed. The difficulty is no longer about quantity; it’s about whether the people you’re looking for match a job that keeps shifting underneath them. Those who’ve recognised this have stopped treating each vacancy as a separate scramble and started connecting recruitment to strategic workforce planning, that is, to a longer-term view of the skills and capabilities they’ll actually need.

Hiring for Hard Roles: The Shortage That Refuses to Cool

When the wider market softens, you’d expect hard-to-fill roles to ease along with everything else. However, they don’t. They concentrate instead. 

The Employer Skills Survey 2024, the government’s largest study of its kind with responses from 22,712 employers across the UK, shows skill-shortage vacancies have dropped in raw number from 531,200 in 2022 to 250,500 in 2024. That’s a noticeable easing, and it’s worth acknowledging honestly. It’s another indication that the post-pandemic crunch has passed. 

But look at the proportion rather than the count. Skill-shortage vacancies still make up 27% of all vacancies, down from a 2022 peak of 36%, but noticeably higher than the years before the pandemic. In other words, the volume of hiring has cooled, but the concentration of difficulty in skills-related roles hasn’t followed it down. 

There’s a useful distinction buried in that survey too. A hard-to-fill vacancy is simply one an employer struggles to fill, for any reason; a skill-shortage vacancy is the subset where the struggle comes specifically from a lack of skills, qualifications or experience among applicants. Not every difficult role is a skills problem. Some are about pay, location, hybrid expectations or a hiring process that moves too slowly. But a stubborn quarter of them are about capability, and that share isn’t shrinking the way the larger numbers suggest. 

This is where falling vacancy figures become a trap. They tempt you to wait, to assume a slower market will eventually deliver the person you need. The data says otherwise. Your hardest roles behave independently of the wider trend, and reactive hiring limits you to the 20% -30% of the market who are active seekers, leaving the passive (and often most capable) talent untouched. A vacancy left open in the hope that the market turns rarely improves the outcome, instead it simply becomes a slow vacancy. The organisations navigating this successfully don’t rely on reactive waiting; they use strategic workforce planning to build a bridge to that passive market before hiring becomes business-critical.

And the financial consequences add up quickly. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation, working with Oxford Economics, found that a poor hire at mid-manager level on a £42,000 salary can cost a business more than £132,000 once you add up wasted salary, lost productivity, training and the knock-on turnover. That’s before you count the strain on the team covering the gap and the second search you’ll run to put it right. 

When the Job Description Is Older Than the Job

A lot of hard roles stay empty simply because you’re describing a job that no longer encapsulates what’s needed. The specification, not the candidate, is often the thing in short supply. And without strategic workforce planning connecting today’s hiring to tomorrow’s capability needs, that gap keeps widening.

Consider how quickly the work itself is moving. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, built on responses from over 1,000 of the world’s largest employers representing more than 14 million workers, projects that 39% of the core skills required across jobs will change by 2030. (It’s worth flagging that the figure doing the rounds online, that skills will change by 50% within two years, isn’t what the WEF found; the verified number is 39% by the end of the decade.)

 In a market where the job itself keeps adapting, the defining hiring question is no longer ‘who has done this before?’ but ‘who is built to handle what comes next?'”

That pace of change reaches further into your organisation than you might think. The OECD found in 2024 that most workers exposed to AI won’t need specialist AI skills at all; instead, AI is reshaping the everyday tasks and the mix of skills those roles demand. In occupations highly exposed to AI, the capabilities most in demand turned out to be management and business skills, and the share of those roles asking for at least one emotional, cognitive or digital skill rose by eight percentage points.

This is insight into why there are so many failed searches. The finance role, the marketing role, the operations role you’re trying to fill has changed in substance, even if its title hasn’t. You’re screening CVs against a list of past tools and tasks while the actual job has moved on to judgement, adaptability, and the ability to work alongside systems that didn’t exist when the description was written. Strategic workforce planning asks you to look ahead at what those roles will require, not just what they’ve historically demanded, and to build your hiring criteria around that forward view.

The encouraging part is that this is fixable, and it costs nothing to start. Rewriting a role around the capability it now requires, rather than the experience it used to require, isn’t a nice-to-have consideration anymore. It’s the foundation of any hiring strategy that actually works.

Everyone’s Doing It. Almost No One’s Doing It.

If the fix is to hire for capability over credentials, the good news is that most employers already agree. The other side of the coin, though, is that very few are pulling it off — and it’s precisely your hard-to-fill roles that pay the price.

The evidence on this is striking, and it comes from outside the recruitment trade, which makes it harder to dismiss. The Paper Ceiling (a term for how degree requirements artificially restrict talent pools) remains a stubborn barrier to filling hard roles. Researchers at Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute examined firms that had publicly dropped degree requirements and found that fewer than 1 in 700 new hires were workers without a bachelor’s degree. Around 45% of those firms had changed their requirements in name only. The policy moved; the behaviour didn’t.

Intent is running ahead of execution elsewhere too. The WGU Workforce Decoded Report, based on more than 3,000 hiring professionals, found that only 46% plan to increase their emphasis on skills-based hiring through 2026. So the approach everyone praises in principle is something fewer than half are committing to expand in practice.

Which raises a good question worth putting to your own team: if the strategy is sound and the appetite is there, why do the outcomes barely move?

The issue sits inside your own processes rather than out in the market. It’s the applicant tracking filter that screens out anyone missing a specific job title. It’s the job description that still opens with ‘five years’ experience in’ a named system. It’s the interview that asks people to recount what they’ve done rather than show how they’d handle what they haven’t. The ambition lives in the strategy deck; the old habits live in the workflow. Hard-to-fill roles fall straight through that gap. Not because the right people don’t exist, but because your process was never designed to find them.

Reactive vs. Strategic: A Commercial Comparison

Feature	Reactive Recruitment	Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP)
Primary Focus	Filling an immediate vacancy	Aligning people strategy with 3–5 year goals
Talent Pool	Active job seekers (approx. 20% of market)	Passive and internal talent markets
Selection Criteria	Past job titles and ‘Paper Ceiling’ degrees	Skills-based capability and learning agility
Business Impact	High cost of bad hires and productivity loss	9% higher retention and predicted performance

The ‘T’ That Holds Under Pressure

None of this means experience stops counting. In regulated and high-stakes work, it counts enormously, and any argument that pretends otherwise should be treated with suspicion.

The better perspective is what you might call a T-shaped profile that holds up under risk. The deep vertical bar is the specialist grounding: the regulatory knowledge, the technical depth, the hard-won judgement you can’t shortcut. The horizontal bar is the breadth that now sits across it: technology literacy, data fluency, the ability to learn fast when the rules change. The point isn’t to trade one for the other. It’s to recognise that, moving forward, depth alone leaves a role half-built.

Finance shows this clearly. The Financial Services Skills Commission estimates that around 160,000 UK financial services professionals need urgent AI upskilling, with a 35-percentage-point gap between demand for AI-related skills and the talent available to meet it. These aren’t people short on financial expertise; they’re experts whose horizontal bar needs extending. A finance leader who can read a P&L and interrogate a model, a communications professional with genuine commercial awareness, a marketer fluent in both narrative and data: that’s the type of blend that’s hard to find and worth building a strategy around.

This is precisely where strategic workforce planning earns its place. When you map the capability your organisation will need over the next two to three years (not just the vacancy you need to fill this quarter) the T-shaped profile stops being a nice concept and becomes a hiring brief. You can see which roles are drifting toward that blend, which internal people are close to it, and where the external market genuinely holds what you need.

And there’s a constructive paradox in the numbers that’s easy to miss. While employers say they want this future-ready capability, investment in building it has fallen. The Employer Skills Survey 2024 records training spend at £1,700 per employee, the lowest in the series and down 18.5% in real terms since 2011.

That gap between what we say we need and what we’re putting in to grow it has a consequence. If you’re investing less in developing capability internally, every external hire carries more weight, which makes getting those hires right more decisive than it’s ever been, not less. Strategic workforce planning is what connects those two pressures. It turns a reactive search into a deliberate decision about whether to build, buy, or borrow the capability you need.

So where does that leave a leader trying to fill the essential roles? A few changes tend to separate the organisations that face this issue head on from those still waiting for the market to rescue them:

• Write roles around the capability they need next, not the experience they needed last, and strip out filters that exclude strong candidates from adjacent backgrounds. 
• Test for adaptability and problem-solving directly, using scenario-based questions that reveal how someone thinks rather than only what they’ve done. 
• Treat recruitment, succession and development as one connected plan, so a hard-to-fill role triggers a build-or-buy decision rather than a fresh panic. 
• Build relationships with talent before you need it, instead of relying on a job advert to surface scarce capability on demand. 
• Partner with people who can tell you where genuine capability exists in the market, as opposed to where it’s merely claimed on a CV. 

Solving the ‘Hard-to-Fill’ Paradox

The real reason hard-to-fill roles stay empty isn’t market scarcity, and it isn’t even skills scarcity. It’s that recruitment, succession planning, learning, and workforce design are still run as four separate conversations, and hard-to-fill roles fall apart at the seams between them. Fix the seams, and the problem starts to look very different.

What gives us confidence here is that the wider system is moving in exactly this direction. The launch of Skills England and its 2026 call for an employer-led, evidence-driven approach to skills signals that capability planning is becoming a board-level discipline. The Treasury’s decision to commission a review of AI skills in financial services tells you the same thing from the other end: government now treats capability as a question of national competitiveness, not just individual hiring. When policy and the labour market start pointing the same way, the employers who listen and act early tend to set the standard.

This is the work we care about most at Career Moves. Our value isn’t in filling a seat quickly; it’s in helping you connect those four conversations and bringing honest intelligence on where the capability you need actually lives. The market is full of hard-to-fill roles that are really roles described badly, and we’d rather help you redraw the brief than chase a phantom candidate for it.

That’s a smaller shift than it sounds. For decades, the defining hiring question was: who has done this before? In a market where the job itself keeps adapting, the more important question is: who’s built to handle what comes next?

If that’s an area you’d like to work through properly, book a consultation with our team, and we’ll help you plan for the roles that count most.