The 2024 hiring slowdown — and what it taught us

After three frantic years, 2024 was the year the UK labour market exhaled. Vacancy numbers fell steadily through the first half, time-to-decision stretched from weeks to months, and the balance of power tilted — for the first time since 2020 — gently back towards employers. If you spent 2021 and 2022 losing candidates to counter-offers and competing bids, 2024 felt like a different profession entirely.

I run our technology and digital practice, which felt the shift earlier and harder than most, so this is a view from the front line as much as from the data. What follows is what actually happened, which roles held up, why it happened, and — most usefully — what a slower market teaches you about doing this job well. Because the honest truth is that 2024 was, quietly, one of our better years, and understanding why tells you a great deal about how hiring really works.

What actually happened

The slowdown wasn't a cliff-edge; it was a gradual change in the weather. Four shifts defined it.

• Expansion hiring gave way to replacement hiring. Companies stopped building speculative new teams and focused on filling only the seats they genuinely couldn't operate without.
• Interim and contract demand rose as clients hedged — a fractional or fixed-term leader is far easier to justify than a permanent head when the outlook is uncertain.
• Salaries plateaued after three years of sharp inflation. The bidding wars cooled, and counter-offers became far less common.
• Candidates turned cautious. Job security regained its shine; the appetite for a speculative move for a marginal raise all but disappeared.

Why it happened

None of this came from nowhere. Interest rates had been climbing since 2022, and by 2024 the cost of capital had finally worked its way through to hiring budgets. Money was expensive, growth was harder to fund, and boards responded rationally by slowing the pace of investment — and headcount is one of the largest investments most businesses make. Add a general election, some global uncertainty, and the lingering hangover of over-hiring in the 2021–22 boom, and you had every ingredient for a cautious year.

The over-hiring point matters, especially in technology. A lot of businesses expanded their teams aggressively in the boom on the assumption that growth would continue indefinitely. When it didn't, 2024 became a year of correction — not mass redundancy in most cases, but a long pause on new hiring while teams grew back into their headcount. That is the real reason volume technology recruitment softened so much.

Which roles held up

A slowdown is never uniform. Some parts of the market barely noticed it; others contracted sharply. Here is roughly how the segments we cover fared through the year.

The pattern is instructive. The most senior and most specialist work held up best. Boards change regardless of the cycle — a chief executive retires, a chair steps down, a business in trouble actually needs new leadership — so executive search stayed busy. Finance leadership stayed steady because good financial control matters more, not less, when money is tight. Interim rose because it's the natural hedge in an uncertain market. It was the high-volume, expansion-driven end — the "hire ten engineers this quarter" mandates — that softened most.

A slower market is not a worse market for those who do search properly. It's a worse market for those who never did.

What a slowdown does to candidates

The other half of the story is human. In a hot market, candidates move quickly, sometimes recklessly — three offers on the table, a decision in a week, a leap taken on optimism. In a slow market, that behaviour reverses entirely. People stay put, they weigh security heavily, and when they do consider a move they interrogate the opportunity far more carefully: is this business stable, is the leadership credible, is the role real or a vanity hire that won't survive the next budget round?

For a firm like ours, that shift is welcome. A cautious candidate is a candidate who wants exactly what we offer — an honest, senior conversation about whether a move is genuinely right, with no pressure and no fee. We spent a lot of 2024 talking people out of moves as often as into them, and that honesty is precisely what a nervous candidate remembers when they're ready to move for real.

What it meant for salaries

One of the more useful things a slowdown does is reset expectations on pay. After three years in which candidates could reasonably expect a substantial rise simply for moving, 2024 brought that to a halt. Salaries didn't fall in most of our markets, but they stopped climbing, and the eye-watering counter-bids of the boom largely disappeared. For employers who had watched wage inflation nervously, this was a quiet relief; for candidates, it was a recalibration that took some getting used to.

The exception, as ever, was genuine scarcity. Where a skill was in short supply — specialist data leadership, regulated-industry finance, certain commercial technology roles — pay held firm or kept rising even as the wider market cooled. That divergence is worth remembering: a slowdown is an average, and averages hide the specifics. If you happen to be one of the few people who can do a hard, in-demand job well, a soft market barely touches you.

The lesson

When hiring is easy, sloppy recruitment can hide. Fill enough roles in a frantic market and nobody scrutinises how you did it. When hiring is hard, the difference between a referenced shortlist of three and a database dump of thirty becomes glaringly, unavoidably obvious — because a client making one careful hire has no tolerance for noise, and every candidate has to count.

That is why 2024 rewarded rigour, and why a slowdown suits a firm built the way ours is. Our clients didn't want more options; they wanted the right one, referenced and honest. Our shortlists stayed short, our advice stayed straight, and our retention actually improved because both sides took more care. A downturn is a stress test, and the firms it breaks are the ones that were only ever selling activity.

Thinking about a hire in a cautious market? Here's how we work with employers — or get in touch and a senior consultant will come back to you within one working day.