A developer on our books turned down three job offers in the same week last month.
He wasn't being difficult about it.
Five different companies were chasing him at once, and the one that moved fastest inside 48 hours won the offer. That's not normal, even in a sector used to fast-moving candidates. And it's a symptom of something bigger happening in the UK jobs market right now, something worth understanding before your next senior hire goes out to advert.
UK job postings overall are down about a tenth since the start of last year, according to Bloomberg's reporting of data Indeed shared this month.
Manufacturing postings have fallen even further, down 58% since the summer of 2022.
Youth unemployment is sitting at its highest point in over a decade. On paper, that looks like a jobs market in retreat. Except one line in that same dataset doesn't fit the pattern at all.
Software development vacancies are up 14%, not a typo or a rounding error, while almost everything else around it keeps falling.
Why is software hiring rising while everything else cools?
Jack Kennedy, Indeed's senior economist, called it a two-speed labour market in that same report, and the two speeds matter more than the headline number.
One lane is crowded with people chasing too few roles. The other, the senior end, the end where AI skills actually apply, is closer to a seller's market, because there simply aren't enough people in it who can do the job on day one. So employers aren't hiring fewer developers because they've decided they need fewer developers.
They're hiring far fewer at entry level, and fighting much harder for the senior end, the architects, the DevOps leads, the engineers who can get an AI tool doing something useful in production rather than just demoing it in a meeting.
We've been feeling this shift on the desk for months, if I'm honest, well before it made it into a headline. A vacancy for a senior software engineer or a solutions architect used to take four to six weeks to close. That window keeps shrinking wherever the role touches AI, cloud or data engineering, and finding the right person for a senior IT role is only getting harder from here.
It's a shortage of developers with current, specific experience, not developers generally, and there are only so many of those people in the market at any one time.
What does this mean if you're hiring a senior IT role right now?
Speed and precision matter more than they did two years ago.
A generalist process built for a slower market doesn't hold up anymore. Think job board post, couple of agency calls, three-week shortlist, the sort of timeline that assumes candidates will sit tight and wait. But they won't, not this year, and by the time a strong senior developer or IT manager reaches a third interview, they usually have another offer sitting on the table already.
A slow process loses good candidates to a faster one, even when your offer is better on paper.
Ours would too, frankly, if we let it drift. A specialist IT recruiter earns their fee here. Not because of some secret network, though a decent one helps.
It comes down to a process built around who actually exists in the senior IT market today, rather than who a generic advert hopes will apply, and that means fewer wasted weeks, fewer CVs that read beautifully on paper and fall apart at second interview, and a shortlist that reflects where the market actually sits rather than where it sat when the job description was last updated.
So that's the case for treating this as a specialist job, whether it's handled in-house or through a specialist IT recruitment agency. It's also worth being honest about why a generalist agency, or an internal talent team stretched thin across every department, tends to struggle here.
They're rarely set up to know the difference between a platform engineer and a DevOps lead, or why three years in fintech might matter more than eight years somewhere slower moving. We've written before about why that distinction matters, and this data is exactly the kind of thing that proves it. There's a second problem worth flagging here, one most employers haven't clocked yet.
Youth unemployment across the UK is at its highest point in over a decade, per the same Indeed dataset, while junior developer and graduate-level tech roles keep shrinking alongside it.
That's not just bad news for the graduates hunting for a first role.
It's bad news for any business planning to grow its own senior engineers over the next several years too, because the pipeline that used to produce them is thinning out at exactly the point it's needed most. Put more bluntly, the senior developers you'll want to hire down the line are the graduates nobody's taking a chance on right now. None of this is a reason to panic.
It's a reason to be realistic about timelines, and honest about where your current process is losing candidates.
If a senior developer, architect or IT manager role has been open longer than six weeks, that's not bad luck.
It's the market described above, doing precisely what the data says it's doing, whether anyone in the business has noticed yet or not. Sorting it isn't complicated, even if it isn't always easy. Move faster. Be clearer about what you actually need.
And go to people who spend every day in this specific corner of the market rather than treating it like any other vacancy. If your next senior developer, architect or IT manager hire needs to move fast without cutting corners on quality, get in touch and I'll talk you through what the market really looks like for that specific role before you write the job description.
It costs nothing to find out if you're chasing a rare skill set or dealing with a slow process. And if you're the developer weighing up five offers at once, our live IT vacancies are worth a look too, though I suspect you already know your market value better than most.
