A managing director opened our meeting this week by reading the latest vacancy figures off a phone, then announced that hiring a head of marketing was about to get easy. It was a fair guess, and plenty of employers are making the same one.

The numbers behind it are real. On 20th October the Office for National Statistics reported 691,000 vacancies in the three months to 30th September, down 21,000 on the previous reading. Personnel Today's write-up of the release called it a 12-year low once the pandemic is set aside.

And the ONS counts 2.4 unemployed people for every vacancy, which sounds like a queue out of the door.

But a shortage of jobs is a very different thing from a surplus of candidates for a senior marketing hire. The two get lumped together whenever the headlines turn gloomy. Treating them as one is where hiring plans go wrong, because the plan gets built around a market that doesn't exist for the person you actually need.

Why doesn't a weak jobs market make senior marketing roles easier to fill?

Senior marketers are rarely unemployed, so a weak jobs market doesn't hand you more of them. A head of marketing with a good record is usually in post, and a falling vacancy count makes them more cautious about moving. The ONS has unemployment at 4.7% for the three months to August. That figure says nothing about whether any of those people can run a marketing function.

A weak market widens the pile of applications without improving what is in it.

Anyone who has posted a marketing manager role on a job board lately knows how it goes. Applications arrive in volume, many from people stepping up a level or sideways from a business that is cutting back. The shortlist takes a week to sort rather than a day. And the person who has run a team and owned a budget is usually missing from it.

The strong candidates are somewhere else entirely, weighing a move against a pay rise at their current firm, and the ONS says regular pay in the private sector is growing at 3.0% a year. It isn't much, but it is a rise they can bank, against the risk of starting somewhere new while everyone else is announcing cuts.

Payroll data points the same way. Personnel Today reports that the count of payrolled employees held flat at 30.3 million. And flat markets make people sit still.

What does a quiet jobs market change for a marketing hiring plan?

A quiet jobs market changes how much room you have on timing, not how scarce good people are. Fewer rival employers are advertising, so you can run a more careful process than you could in a frantic spring. But the best candidates still need a reason to leave a job that feels safe. So the offer and the story behind the role matter more, not less.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has described the fall in vacancies as bad news for people looking for work, and it wants the government to look again at employment costs, including employer National Insurance.

Whatever the cause, employers hiring cautiously have less slack in the budget. A wrong appointment hurts more than it used to. And it is harder to start the search again from scratch.

Running a patient search without losing the good people

Patience only helps if it is pointed at the right people. The common mistake is to treat the volume of applications as proof that the market has loosened, then work through them in the order they arrived.

Start with the job itself.

A marketing director who owns a budget and answers for pipeline is a different hire from a brand manager with a bigger title, and a vague brief pulls in both. Decide which one you need and write down the revenue the role is meant to move. Then screen on that before anyone's CV charms you for other reasons.

Keep your pace up for the few who are strong. A good candidate will wait a short while, and a process that drifts will lose them to a counter-offer from the firm they were about to leave. Two interview rounds with a clear decision date beat four rounds with a silence in the middle.

Price the offer honestly too.

Our salary guides are a fair starting point, but a number that looked right in the spring can look thin against a counter-offer in a nervous autumn. Check it against what the person is being offered to stay.

But if the budget is the sticking point, there is a middle route. An interim marketing director can set the plan and keep the team moving while you decide whether the permanent seat is worth the cost. And you get months of watching how someone senior works before you commit, which is more than any interview will show you.

Specialist search earns its fee at this stage. The marketers you most want are rarely scrolling job boards, and a recruiter who knows who is performing, who is restless and who has been passed over can reach them with a conversation instead of an advert. When adverts bring volume rather than quality, that conversation is most of what you are paying for. A job board rarely reaches them.

And it protects the people already inside the business.

A marketing team watching an empty leadership seat for months starts to wonder whether it will ever be filled. The good ones begin to wonder about their own next move. They are the people you can least afford to lose while you wait for a better market that was never coming.

The managing director with the phone was right about the number and wrong about what it meant for the search. Those 691,000 vacancies are a headline. The marketing leader you need is still a name, and finding that name is still the job.

If a marketing leadership search is on your list this quarter, the marketing recruitment team at Coburg Banks can look at your brief before it goes anywhere near a job board.