A property company in London just hired its first-ever chief technology officer. Five years ago that sentence wouldn't have made sense.
Downing, a real estate developer and operator, brought in Jonathan Tizard this month to run technology, data and digital services across its student, residential and operating platforms. Tizard spent years leading tech functions at Boohoo, Missguided and LadBible before running technology at Vita Group, so scale experience isn't the issue here.
What's interesting is something else. A property business decided, for the first time in its history, that this needed to be a seat at the board table rather than a line item buried under operations. Downing's joint chief executive framed it as a milestone in becoming a more technology-enabled, data-driven business. That's the polite version.
The blunter version is that somebody on that board finally admitted the company had outgrown running IT as a support function, and that waiting any longer to fix it was the riskier option.
I see this exact moment play out on the IT desk here at Coburg Banks more often than you'd think, and not just in property. Manufacturers, care groups, professional services firms, all working out roughly the same thing at roughly the same time. Usually a year or two later than they'd admit out loud.
Why are non-tech businesses hiring their first CTO right now?
Because the tools changed faster than the org chart did. A business running AI-assisted operations, live customer data and digital platforms through an IT manager who's mostly fielding helpdesk tickets has a structural gap, not a staffing gap. Somebody needs to own the strategy, not just keep the lights on. Boards are starting to notice that difference, and once they notice it, they tend to move faster than you'd expect.
It isn't happening in a vacuum either. The KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs for August found that permanent placements had gone 45 months without growth before finally stabilising in July, the first month without a decline since September 2022.
Temporary vacancies rose at their fastest pace since August 2023, which is worth sitting with for a second. Read that as caution starting to lift. So when hiring caution lifts, the strategic roles businesses had quietly been avoiding tend to be first through the door.
Technology leadership is exactly the sort of role that gets parked during a downturn and then rushed once conditions ease.
Here's the part nobody plans for properly. This decision almost never gets made calmly, on a spreadsheet, six months in advance.
It gets made after something forces the issue. A data project outgrows the improvised system holding it together, or a security scare makes the board finally ask who actually owns this. Sometimes it's simpler than that. A competitor hires someone sharp and it becomes obvious what your own business is missing.
By the time the need is undeniable, it's also urgent.
And urgent hires get compromised.
What's different about hiring a CTO for a growing business versus a big tech company?
Scale changes the job completely, in ways that catch a lot of first-time hirers out. A CTO at a large tech company manages layers of specialist teams and rarely writes a line of code themselves. But the first CTO at a growing SME has to set the strategy and still stay close enough to delivery to unblock it personally, because there's no layer beneath them yet to delegate to.
That's a different skill set entirely, and it's a much smaller pool of people who can actually do both well. It also means the best candidates usually aren't looking. The strongest first-CTO hires we place are rarely active jobseekers, and they're doing well where they already are.
So someone has to go and find them, make the case properly, and run a process that moves fast enough not to lose them to a counteroffer.
Cultural fit carries more weight too. In a flat, fifty-person business, one senior hire either meshes with how decisions actually get made or they don't, and there's nowhere to hide either way. We watch this pattern from the recruiting side more than most people get to see it play out in full.
Take the finance director who kept "sort IT properly next year" on the agenda for three straight years, every single year. Or the care group that only created a head of IT role after a data incident nobody wanted to repeat.
An engineering firm lost a promising acquisition once because due diligence turned up a technology function nobody senior was actually accountable for. None of these businesses were behind on ambition. They were behind on recognising that technology leadership had quietly become a board-level gap. It happens more often than most boards like to admit.
Waiting rarely makes the decision easier. It just makes the eventual hire more rushed, and rushed hires are usually the ones that go wrong.
What this means if you're weighing up your first senior tech hire
If your business is scaling, adding AI or data tooling, or simply outgrowing the person currently "doing IT" alongside three other jobs, that's worth naming honestly rather than parking it for another quarter. Not every growing business needs a full CTO on day one. Plenty do better starting with a head of IT who can grow into the wider remit as the business does.
But the businesses that get this right tend to start the conversation before the gap becomes a crisis, not after it does.
That's the sort of role our IT recruitment team spends most of its time on: senior, permanent technology leadership hires for businesses making this move for the first time, not helpdesk or first-line roles. If you're circling this decision and want a straight read on what good looks like at your size and budget, that conversation is worth having before the need turns urgent rather than after.
Our hiring guides cover what a realistic process and timeline look like once you're ready to move. Send us the brief when you're ready. We'll tell you honestly whether the market can deliver what you have in mind, budget included.
