Blog

• Job Hugging: Four Claims About Cautious Workers, Tested Against the Data — UK vacancies sat about a tenth below their pre-pandemic level in mid-2026, so staying put is a rational move rather than a loyal one. We test four claims about job hugging and what each means for hiring.
• Return to Office Mandates and the Hiring Impact: The Chain From One Memo to an Open Seat — ONS data shows UK hybrid working sits overwhelmingly with managers and graduates, which is exactly who a blanket mandate asks to give it up. Here is the chain from the memo to a vacancy that will not close.
• What Can a Previous Employer Say in a Reference? A UK Request, Graded — Acas leaves the detail to the referee, the Equality Act fences off health, and the ICO wants the whole process declared up front. We grade a typical UK reference request and rebuild it.
• Pay Transparency in Job Adverts: A Plain-English Primer for Founders — The EU Pay Transparency Directive moves the salary conversation into the advert, and most member states missed the June 2026 deadline. Here is how to build a defensible pay band before a candidate asks.
• Why the Best Recruiters Are Made, Not Born — Gut instinct fills seats. Structured recruiting builds teams that stay. Here's an honest teardown of how gut-feel hiring habits form, what they cost, and the ten-minute fixes that turn recruiting into a craft you can teach and defend.
• Unfair Dismissal at Six Months: What the Employment Rights Act Changes for Hiring in 2027 — From 1 January 2027 the UK qualifying period for unfair dismissal falls to six months. That makes the month-three conversation the most important date in your hiring calendar.
• Hybrid Working and Retention: What a Randomised Trial Found About Quit Rates — A randomised trial of 1,612 employees found hybrid working improved job satisfaction and cut quit rates by a third, with no measurable effect on performance grades or promotions. Here is what that means for hiring.
• Should You Accept a Counteroffer? Four Claims, Weighed Against the Survey Data — One UK survey found 74 per cent of people who accepted a counteroffer had left within a year. Here are four familiar claims about counteroffers, each given a verdict and a source.
• Fake Job Candidates: A Calm Guide to Verifying Who You Are Interviewing — Gartner projects that up to one in four candidate profiles may be fabricated by 2028, and 6% of job seekers surveyed admitted to interview fraud. One live check, applied to everybody, covers most of the risk.
• How to Reject a Candidate After an Interview: One Email, Taken Apart — A composite rejection email scores four out of ten against five tests. Here is where the other six points went, with the rewrite that earns them back.
• Ask a Headhunter: Should I Ever Hire My Friend? — Hiring a friend can work - but this scenario scores just 3 out of 10. Here is how to run the scorecard before it costs you both the role and the relationship.
• Why the Best Talent Strategies Take Years, Not Quarters — The long game in talent strategy means building candidate relationships, developing people, and creating honest feedback cultures long before you feel the pressure to hire.
• How Do You Identify the Founding Hire? — The founding hire isn't just your first key person — it's the decision that sets the chain for everything that follows. Get the role definition wrong, and the sourcing, vetting, and first ninety days all reflect that. Here's how to get the sequence right.
• How to Decide Between Multiple Job Offers — Five things candidates are told when choosing between job offers — and how many of them actually hold up. With a decision tree, sharper citations, and one honest uncertainty about what really determines whether you thrive.
• The Employee Referral Premium: Why Referred Hires Stay, and How to Keep It — A study of nine large employers found referred workers were substantially less likely to quit, with the advantage coming from lower turnover and cheaper recruiting. The mechanism is information, and it is easy to break.
• Time to Hire: What the Benchmarks Say and Where Your Days Really Go — A benchmark built on more than 54 million applications puts the median first hire at 75 days for technical roles and 60 for business ones. Here is where that calendar disappears, and the four intervals to track instead.
• Candidate Communication: How First-Time Hirers Stop Losing People to Silence — Poor communication, not pay, was the top reason candidates abandoned applications in one 2024 survey. The remedy is a date and the discipline to honour it.
• Ghost Jobs: Why Employers Advertise Work They Are Not Hiring For — A survey of 649 hiring managers found close to 40% admitted their employer had run ghost adverts. Here is why it happens, how to test a listing in one message, and what honest employers owe applicants.
• Why Your Best Employee Just Quit Without Warning — When your best employee quits without warning, the resignation itself is rarely the real moment of departure - here's how to trace the causal chain backwards and break it.
• Dear Recruiter: My Candidate Ghosted Me After Signing the Offer — Post-offer ghosting breaks the recruitment chain at its most expensive point - here is how to spot the signals earlier and keep candidates genuinely committed through to their first day.