News & Thoughts

Hiring may be picking up in 2026, but so is risk. As confidence returns to the market, your best people have more options than ever. This blog explores why staff retention must sit alongside attraction, and how salary benchmarking, structured onboarding and proactive development conversations can protect the team you have already built.

As we move further into 2026, you might be feeling like your organisation is facing a recruitment landscape that’s marked by rapid change and a bunch of uncertainty. Typically, permanent recruitment is the go-to, but what it can lack is the agility that businesses need at the moment to respond to the current market fluctuations we’re seeing. Temporary and contract hires can provide you with a powerful alternative; using interim talent can give you flexibility and control over the costs typically associated with hiring. They can also provide you with access to specialist skills that you might need to get through a specific project, or through a period of change in your organisation.

For years, hiring decisions been based on job titles, degrees, and predictable, usually linear, career paths. As we move into 2026, what our team here at Sewell Wallis is seeing is a shift. There’s pressure across the board – the business world is uncertain, and teams need to adapt quickly, which sometimes means they need to hire faster. This means that they need talent that can do the job, not just look good on paper. Enter skills-based hiring.

We’ve all heard the terms ‘flexible working’ and ‘working flexibly’. Same thing, right? They sound like it, but they’re quite different, both from a legal standpoint and a cultural one. Many organisations often blur the lines around it, which creates confusion and can lead to mixed expectations for both employee and employer.

Good onboarding has always mattered in recruitment, but it’s become critical that we pay more attention to it. With major changes in UK employment law now coming into play, how you welcome and support new hires is no longer just a people strategy that reflects on your culture, it’s a compliance necessity.

We’re heading rapidly towards the Christmas period, and the time of year where work starts to pile up as people take leave and time away from work. The big rush to get everything wrapped up by the end of the year, keep of top of current workloads and make plans for the new year can really make the end of the year feel overwhelming.