Two calls landed on my desk in the same week, from two businesses in the same boat, and only one of them did anything about it.

One was a manufacturing distributor outside Leicester, the other a similar-sized firm near Nottingham, and each had a sales director's chair sitting empty since spring. Neither owner had been careless about it. They'd simply been waiting, the way most owners have waited for two years, for a sign things were actually turning before committing to the cost of a senior appointment. Nobody was in a rush to be wrong twice.

It arrived last week, and almost nobody noticed it land. The S&P Global flash UK PMI came out showing business activity at its strongest pace in four months, with the composite reading climbing to 52.5.

Why isn't hiring picking up with the rest of the economy?

Services climbed to a six-month high, and manufacturing only softened slightly. Consumer confidence hit its best level in two years, and firms across services are more optimistic than they've been in seven months. But job losses in that sector are still happening, just more slowly than before, falling at the slowest pace since last October.

Growth is back before confidence has caught up with it.

Firms are expanding again, and yet most haven't unlearned the caution that two properly flat years taught them. Headcount is always the last thing to move. The gap between the two, activity climbing while hiring stays frozen, is exactly where those two Midlands businesses were sitting, neither quite trusting the number yet. One rang us that same afternoon, and the other is still waiting.

What does waiting for certainty actually cost you?

It costs you the candidates who move early.

Somebody weighing up a senior sales move in a cautious market wants proof the business is actually growing, not just claiming it is, before handing in their notice. A properly strong candidate can simply wait for that proof from somewhere else instead. Or rather, by the time you offer it, they've already been placed, usually by whichever business moved first and asked questions later.

None of this is theoretical. It happened to a client of ours twice this month, six weeks apart. First a sales director who'd have suited them perfectly and accepted an offer elsewhere. Then the replacement they hired instead, at a noticeably higher salary than the first appointment would ever have cost them.

The whole saga cost them close to two extra months they hadn't budgeted for, and a candidate they'd really wanted, watching somebody else's onboarding announcement on LinkedIn a few weeks later.

Small detail, but it stuck with me.

The second candidate wanted two extra weeks of gardening leave written into his contract before signing, because his employer refused to release him early out of pure spite. That clause alone added a month onto a hire that should have taken half that time. If your own numbers haven't been checked lately, it's worth holding your offer against a current sales salary guide before assuming the market hasn't moved.

We watched something similar play out at a logistics firm outside Derby last year, on the far side of a much smaller dip than this one. They waited for the numbers to be undeniable, then spent months trying to counter every rival offer their shortlist kept picking up along the way. Two of the four candidates they'd originally been offered were gone before the business had even finished deciding.

The part that's easy to miss

This, oddly, is exactly when to hire a head of sales.

Your competitors are still telling themselves the recovery isn't real, while the sharper ones two doors down are already interviewing quietly, before anyone notices they're hiring at all. We're not saying that only because it suits us, though it obviously does. It's also what the data and the phone calls happen to be saying at the same time, and that alignment doesn't come along often enough to ignore.

A specialist sales recruitment agency earns its fee in exactly this kind of window.

Not by outrunning a job board, though we usually do that too. By knowing which senior candidates are quietly open to a conversation before they've updated a CV anywhere public, because they've read the same growth figures and are asking the same question about their own employer. It's the part no database replicates.

So what should a cautious employer actually do with this?

Start the conversation now, even if an offer is a month off.

A proper search for a senior sales hire rarely moves in a straight line. References take longer than anyone plans for, particularly at director level, where the people worth calling are themselves directors who take three attempts to reach and a fourth to get a straight answer from. The right candidate is usually already employed, not looking, which takes longer to find than posting an advert and hoping.

Waiting until October doesn't change any of that.

It just means starting the same six-week process a month later than the business down the road. And they get first look at whoever's quietly ready to move, purely because they picked up the phone sooner.

But brief internally now too, even before you've picked an agency. Board sign-off on a senior salary band often takes longer than the search itself. It's one of the more common reasons a strong candidate goes cold. Sort that piece out in parallel, not after you've already found somebody good.

If you've got a senior sales role you've been sitting on, this is the month to talk about it properly rather than wait for a clearer signal. The clearest one you were ever going to get already arrived last week, in a PMI report almost nobody outside a finance team bothered reading.

Weighing up whether now's the right time to hire? Have a conversation with us, no obligation attached. And if you're the one weighing up a move rather than making the hire, our latest sales roles are worth a look too.