A sales director called me last Thursday, not to brief a role, just to vent.

He'd inherited a head of sales two years ago who talks a brilliant game at the monthly review and has quietly missed forecast in four of the last six quarters. He knows it. His board half knows it too. But nobody's done anything about it.

Letting someone go now costs more than it used to.

More money, and more of the kind of scrutiny nobody wants their name attached to. So the underperformer stays, and the team quietly compensates around him. The one lever my client actually controls right now is who he hires next.

That's not a comfortable position to be planning a senior sales appointment from.

New figures from the CIPD, reported by City AM this week, put a shape around a feeling a lot of sales leaders already had. Private sector employment intentions have dropped to a net balance of plus 11, matching the joint lowest reading the CIPD has recorded outside the pandemic. Only 57% of private sector employers now plan to recruit in the next three months.

That's the lowest figure since the CIPD started tracking the measure back in 2016.

Why has UK hiring nearly stopped without a wave of redundancies?

Because employers have found a third option between growing the team and cutting it. They're just holding still. The CIPD's overall net employment balance sits at plus 9, close to its lowest point of the pandemic era.

Redundancy intentions haven't spiked to match it. James Cockett, the CIPD's senior labour market economist, described the picture as a stuck labour market.

One that closes off routes in for people trying to get their first job. It stalls anyone hoping to move up. And it slowly drains the experienced talent pipeline employers will need again eventually. Low hire, low fire is the phrase doing the rounds among the recruiters I know right now, and it fits uncomfortably well.

Because the usual safety valve isn't really available anymore.

Why does one senior sales hire matter more when nobody's letting anyone go?

In a faster-moving market, a sales director who isn't working out gets managed out within a year, sometimes less. The business tries again with a cleaner slate. That's no longer as easy as it used to be.

That happens far less easily now. Redundancy costs more. Boards are more cautious about the story it tells internally. And most finance directors would rather absorb a mediocre head of sales for another year than sign off the settlement and the recruitment fee that follows.

Which means the hire itself is doing more work than it used to.

We see this from the agency side constantly, more this year than any I can remember.

A client rings us six months after a rushed appointment, not to start a new search exactly, but more to ask whether it's too soon to admit the last one isn't working. It usually isn't too soon. But by then they've usually lost the easy exit, half a year of pipeline, and the confidence to trust their own judgement on the next one.

Search "cost of a bad sales hire UK" and you'll find plenty of blog posts quoting a headline multiple.

What that number rarely captures is the year a business spends quietly managing around someone they can't quite move on from. Not while moving on is a bigger decision than the hire itself. Most of that cost never reaches a spreadsheet at all.

What does getting a senior sales hire wrong actually cost you?

Start with the obvious bit. Salary, notice period, and the recruitment cost of doing it twice. That part's simple enough to write down.

Then add the part that never shows up on a spreadsheet.

A head of sales who isn't performing still sits in every pipeline review. He still owns the relationship with your biggest accounts. And he still shapes how the rest of the team behaves, because people copy what leadership quietly tolerates.

Nine or ten months of that is not a rounding error. It's a year of growth you don't get back, sitting under a job title that looked right on the org chart when you signed it off. And that's before anyone even works out what a settlement costs if it finally does end.

So what should a cautious employer actually do about it?

Not freeze the role and hope the market sorts itself out.

That's the instinct, and it's usually the wrong one. A client of ours in Leeds did the opposite back in the spring, while two competitors sat on their hands watching the data instead.

They tested the candidate on how she'd actually handled a deal that nearly fell apart, not just the ones that went well. References got called properly, not skimmed. It took longer than a rushed process would have. But it also meant that when demand did pick up, they already had someone senior enough in the seat to chase it.

The competitors were still deciding whether it was even safe to start.

Good candidates at head of sales or sales director level aren't sitting on job boards refreshing their applications. They're busy, performing somewhere else, and in a market this cautious they're even less likely to move without the right approach from someone they actually trust.

That's the gap a specialist sales recruitment agency is built to close. It's most of what we spend our time on when a brief like this lands on our desk. Not filling a seat quickly, but making sure the person in it is still the right call eighteen months from now.

If you're weighing up what a senior sales appointment should look like even before you commit to it, our guide to hiring a sales director is worth ten minutes.

Low hire, low fire won't last forever. But while it does, the one senior sales hire you make matters more than it has in years, and it's worth treating that way.