Senior recruitment specialist, at Jigsaw Talent Solutions, Robert Kenward shares live insights from across events and experiential agency owners, HR professionals and C-suite decision makers.
As the market moved into the final quarter of the year, hiring didn’t slow, it became more deliberate, more strategic, and more outcome focused.
Kenward said: “I spend most of my time in honest conversations with founders, MDs, hiring managers and C-suite leaders so I get to hear what’s working, what’s breaking and what people are quietly worried about. When you have enough of those conversations, clear patterns start to emerge and I can join the dots from a lot of very candid conversations to share real time insight into what’s happening.”
Below are the standout Q4 2025 trends, plus forecasts for the months ahead.
Trend 1: If you don’t have the salary, change the shape of the role
The post-pandemic salary spike is over. Employers are no longer competing with £15–20k pay jumps – and candidates aren’t moving for them either. Instead, culture, flexibility, benefit packages and values are driving decisions. Kenward said: “Everyone wants someone ‘ready to go’, but if they’re ready to go, they’re already being paid for it. If you don’t have the budget, you have to offer something smarter than money you don’t have.”
One solution gaining traction is non-pro-rata reduced-days roles, particularly in sales and output-driven positions. Kenward commented: “If you’ve got £45–50k to spend, consider three or four days a week – but pay the full salary. Suddenly you open the door to experienced people who wouldn’t normally consider the role, plus you don’t have to spend so much time overseeing them.”
The result is that employers access higher-calibre talent, and candidates gain balance without sacrificing value. Kenward said: “We’re too stuck on five days because that’s how it’s always been. The market is quietly proving there’s a better way.”
Trend 2: Hiring hasn’t stopped – it’s just slowed down (on purpose)
Despite the noise, the market hasn’t frozen. What has changed is how carefully senior hires are being made. Kenward said: “Quality has overtaken speed. Employers are taking longer, asking deeper, measurable questions and doing more due diligence – because bad hires are expensive and disruptive.”
Final-stage processes are becoming more involved: additional interviews, team meetings, informal conversations and deeper scenario testing. While this often adds a week or two to the timeline, it’s producing better outcomes.
Kenward explained: “The upside is retention. People are taking roles because they genuinely align with what they want – not because the vibes were good on the day. It’s frustrating in the short term, but it’s actually building stronger teams long term.”
Trend 3: Sales Hiring Is Dominating – But Strategy Matters More Than Ever
As businesses plan for 2026, sales-focused roles are dominating hiring conversations – from sales directors and commercial leads to client development roles. But expectations are often misaligned. Kenward said: “Too many businesses expect a salesperson to walk in and magically deliver numbers without a plan. Sales isn’t a knee-jerk fix – it’s a strategy.”
Rather than hiring purely for activity, Kenward is advising clients to think bigger. He said: “If you don’t already have a clear sales function, hire someone senior enough to build one – proposition, positioning, process and pipeline – not just someone to ‘hit the phones’.”
Timing also matters. He said: “Bringing sales talent in mid-cycle gives them time to bed in before targets really count. Starting someone in January and expecting instant results just doesn’t make sense.”
Forecasts for the Months Ahead:
Prediction 1: The 9-to-5, five-days-in-the-office debate will finally move On
The office debate isn’t going away – but it is changing. Kenward said: “I’ve shared before that senior leaders being back around people matters, but some agencies will continue to push rigid attendance rules for all staff and, for a small number of teams, that structure will genuinely work. For many others, insisting on presence simply because it’s familiar rather than useful is starting to feel out of step with how work actually gets done.”
He added: “The next generation has watched this industry burn people out. They’ve seen long hours, missed birthdays and exhaustion – and then listened to leaders complain about engagement. It’s not that they don’t want to work. They want work to make sense.”
The employers making progress will stop counting hours and start measuring output. That doesn’t mean chaos or endless individual deals. Kenward said: “You can’t run a business with 99 people on 99 different working arrangements. But you can build clear, role-based working frameworks that reflect reality.”
Those still defaulting to traditional office hours “because that’s how we’ve always done it” may find recruitment and retention getting harder. Kenward says: “An office full of people who can’t leave isn’t culture, it’s captivity.”
Prediction 2: Pay will start to reflect location and office attendance
This is the prediction that raises eyebrows – but like the 9-to-5 debate, pay and location policies are worth pressure-testing. It’s already happening quietly – as remote and hybrid working mature, more organisations are reassessing how pay, location and office attendance link together. Kenward said: “This isn’t about devaluing people. Pay has always been influenced by geography, commuting costs and local economies even if we didn’t say it out loud. That hasn’t suddenly stopped being true.”
When employees relocate for lifestyle reasons and reduce office attendance, salary conversations evolve too – not because capability has changed, but because the economic context has. Kenward said: “Many leaders are exploring this thoughtfully, role by role, to keep businesses sustainable while retaining great people.”
The difference between success and backlash is execution. Kenward said: “Handled transparently, with clear bands and logic, this becomes a grown-up conversation about flexibility and fairness. But if handled emotionally or inconsistently, it destroys trust very quickly.”
Prediction 3: Day rates, timesheets and billable hours will start to look very 2012
As AI accelerates delivery and tools continue to improve, the traditional model of paying for time rather than outcome is starting to feel out of date. “If something can be delivered faster – and to a high standard – why are we treating that as a problem?” asks Kenward. “The value hasn’t dropped just because the clock (and the time sheet) records fewer hours.”
The shift underway is towards outcomes: what is being delivered, by when, and what “good” actually looks like. Agencies that evolve their commercial models to reflect value rather than hours are likely to find 2026 far easier to navigate. “Those clinging to timesheets as their primary measure of value added will spend more time arguing about fairness than building better ways of working,” says Kenward. “The smart agencies will move on.”
Prediction 4: Agencies will specialise again
Ask ten agencies what they do and you’ll hear a familiar answer: “We’re integrated. We do events, activations, content, production, strategy, digital, live… everything.” Buyers are increasingly weary of that. What they want to know is simpler – and harder: “Why you? What are you genuinely best at?”. In 2026, agencies with a clear point of view will stand out. That might mean specialising by sector, format, audience or capability, but it will be real, not just a slide deck of buzzwords.
Specialisation reduces risk for clients and it builds confidence. While it can feel counterintuitive, saying “no” becomes a strategy as it will build confidence in your proposition and reduce perceived client risk. Generalists get compared on price, but specialists get chosen for expertise. “Becoming a specialist recruiter cost me opportunities in the short term, but it built trust in the long term.”
In summary
Q4 was defined by smarter trade-offs, slower but stronger hiring decisions, and a renewed focus on outcomes over hours. Alongside this, employers are starting to move on from outdated measures of success – whether that’s rigid office attendance, time-based billing or one-size-fits-all pay structures – in favour of frameworks that reflect how work is actually delivered, coupled with a clearly defined USP that adds value,
Kenward said: “This isn’t a market in retreat. It’s a market growing up – and the forward-thinking employers who adapt will win.”
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