Our 2024: steadier ground in a slower market
2024 was the year the UK hiring market took a long, deliberate breath. Vacancies drifted down from their post-pandemic peak, decisions that used to take a fortnight took two months, and "let's revisit in Q3" became one of the most familiar phrases in our working week. After three years of acceleration, the market finally slowed — and for a firm that had grown up entirely in a hot market, this was our first real test of whether the model held when the tide went out.
It did. We still grew — 1,048 placements for 214 clients, with the team reaching eighty-one — but it was a more deliberate, harder-won kind of growth than the near-tripling of earlier years. Every placement took a little more work, every client conversation carried a little more caution, and the easy tailwind of a scrambling market was simply gone. We wrote about the slowdown itself in detail in a separate piece; this is the view from inside the firm.
Where the work actually was
A slower market doesn't mean an empty one — it means a differently shaped one. The composition of our mandates changed noticeably over the year, and reading those changes correctly was most of the job.
- Replacement hiring outweighed expansion hiring for the first time since 2020. Clients weren't building new teams so much as making sure the critical seats were filled with the right people.
- Interim and contract demand rose sharply as boards hedged against committing to permanent headcount they weren't yet confident they could sustain.
- Executive search stayed resilient. Boards change regardless of the cycle — a CFO retires, a chair steps down, a business needs new leadership precisely because times are hard. Our most senior work barely noticed the slowdown.
| Measure | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Team | 63 | 81 |
| Placements | 712 | 1,048 |
| Clients (cumulative) | 158 | 214 |
In a slower market, the quality of your shortlist matters more, not less — because the cost of a wrong hire, when you're only making a few, is far higher. That played directly to our strengths.
The discipline of a patient market
The hardest thing about 2024 was not the volume of work but the tempo of it. When decisions slow down, a recruitment firm's cash flow slows with them, and the temptation is to compensate by chasing more mandates and lowering your standards on which ones you take. We deliberately did the opposite. We stayed selective about the work we accepted, kept our shortlists short even when clients had time to look at longer ones, and used the quieter moments to deepen relationships rather than fill pipelines.
We also kept hiring — carefully. Eighteen net new colleagues in a down year is a statement of confidence, and it was a considered one. A slowdown is the best possible time to recruit excellent people, because good consultants become available who wouldn't move in a boom, and because the businesses that keep investing through a trough are the ones that come out of it strongest. We had learned that lesson in 2023, and we applied it again.
What a slower year is good for
There is a quiet upside to a patient market that rarely gets mentioned. When everyone slows down, you get the time to do the parts of the job that a frantic market crowds out: proper referencing, honest candidate conversations, the long lunch with a client that turns a transaction into a relationship. Several of the mandates that defined our 2025 were seeded in the unhurried conversations of 2024. A busy year fills your desk; a slower one, handled well, fills your future.
Reading a market correctly
The commercial skill a slowdown demands is not selling harder — it is reading the market accurately and telling clients the truth about it. In 2024 that meant having some genuinely unwelcome conversations. We told candidates that this was not the year to move for a marginal pay rise, that the safe-looking option might actually be safest. We told clients that the exceptional candidate they wanted probably wasn't available at the salary they'd budgeted, and that stretching for the right person now would look cheap in eighteen months. Not everyone wanted to hear it, and we lost a little short-term work by saying it.
But telling the truth about a soft market is how you become the firm people call when it recovers. A great deal of our strong 2025 was built on the credibility we banked in 2024 by being straight when it would have been easier to be optimistic. A recruitment firm's reputation is made in the years when the news is bad; anyone can look good when the market is carrying them.
We ended the year past 2,300 lifetime placements, on steadier ground than the headlines might have suggested, and already planning a fourth office. Birmingham, we decided, was next. If you're navigating a slower market, from either side of the table, get in touch — a senior consultant will reply within one working day.
If 2020 taught us how to behave in a crisis and 2023 taught us how to grow into a downturn, 2024 taught us patience — the discipline of doing excellent work at the pace a cautious market allows, without panicking, cutting corners, or chasing volume to fill the gap. It is not a glamorous skill and it never makes a headline. But it is, I suspect, the difference between the firms that are still here in a decade and the ones that aren't. A recruiter who can only thrive in a boom isn't really a recruiter; they're a passenger on a market. 2024 confirmed we were neither. It was, in its quiet way, one of the most reassuring years we have had — the year we learned that the firm we had built could sit still, do excellent work, and grow steadily even when the market gave us no help at all.
