A quiet shift is happening

Over the past few years, most conversations around contract hiring have been dominated by IR35, compliance, and how businesses adapt to it. That hasn’t gone away. But underneath that, there’s been a quieter shift — particularly in high-end engineering environments.

More organisations are starting to move back towards PAYE-based contractor models.

Not across the board, and not always deliberately. But it’s happening often enough to be noticeable. And in many cases, it’s not being driven by policy, but by what actually works in practice.

The assumption is usually complexity

In most high-end engineering environments, delays are typically put down to complexity. Tight tolerances, evolving specifications, integration challenges, supply chain disruption — all the usual suspects tend to take the blame. And to be fair, those things do cause problems. But increasingly, they’re not the reason projects are slipping. More often than not, the issue is something much simpler, and slightly less comfortable to acknowledge: the right people aren’t in place when they’re needed.

The pressure to move quickly

In most engineering environments, hiring rarely happens in a calm, controlled way. It tends to be driven by need. A project ramps up, a gap appears, timelines tighten, and suddenly the priority becomes getting someone in place as quickly as possible.

That pressure is completely understandable. When delivery is at stake, speed matters.

But it often creates a familiar tension — the idea that you can either move quickly or hire well, but not both.

We’re really pleased to welcome Rebekah French to the ASL Technical team as we continue to grow our specialist engineering recruitment offering.

Rebekah joins us with a strong track record in technical recruitment, and from the moment we started speaking it was clear she shares the same values that underpin how we work — honesty, quality, and genuinely understanding the industries we support.

There’s a lot of pressure in engineering businesses right now to move faster on hiring.

Projects are tight. Deadlines are tighter. And when a critical role opens up, the instinct is often to speed things up—shorten the process, skip stages, and get someone in the door as quickly as possible.

On the surface, that makes sense.

But in reality, we’re seeing more businesses run into problems not because they moved too slowly… but because they moved too quickly.

When speed becomes the strategy

In most engineering environments, hiring starts with a genuine need. A deadline is approaching, a key phase is about to begin, or a gap has appeared that needs to be filled quickly. The intention is always the same — keep the programme moving and avoid unnecessary delay.

But in some cases, speed stops being the response to a problem and starts becoming the strategy itself. Roles are filled quickly, decisions are made under pressure, and the focus shifts to immediate availability rather than long-term fit.

On the surface, that can feel like progress. The role is covered, the pressure eases, and the project continues. But it doesn’t always take long for cracks to start appearing.

A noticeable shift in contractor priorities

For a long time, contract work in engineering was often associated with flexibility above all else. Shorter engagements, quick transitions between projects, and the ability to move where the work was most interesting or best paid.

That hasn’t disappeared entirely, but there has been a noticeable shift in recent years — particularly at the higher end of the market.

More contractors are now looking for longer-term opportunities, even when they still choose to remain in contract roles rather than move into permanent positions. It’s not about giving up flexibility, but about finding a better balance between movement and stability.

It’s rarely about volume

If you ask most engineering hiring managers what they want from a recruitment partner, the answer is usually quite simple — they want the right person, at the right time, with the least amount of disruption to the programme.

What they don’t tend to ask for is volume.

In fact, too many CVs often creates more work rather than less. Time gets pulled away from delivery, decisions become harder rather than easier, and the process slows down rather than speeds up.

What most hiring managers are really looking for is a small number of well-considered options that genuinely fit the requirement, both technically and in terms of how the individual will operate within the team.

The real cost usually appears later

When businesses think about the cost of hiring, the conversation often starts with salary or contractor rate. That’s understandable, particularly in engineering environments where budgets are tight and programmes are closely managed.

But in reality, the financial cost of a technical hire is usually the easiest part to measure.

The harder costs to quantify are the ones that appear later. Delays to delivery, loss of momentum within a team, rework, increased management time, and the impact on wider programme confidence. In high-end engineering environments, those secondary effects often outweigh the original hiring cost surprisingly quickly.

Most hiring pressure starts long before recruitment begins

In many engineering environments, recruitment only becomes a priority once pressure is already building. A programme ramps up, a key phase approaches, or an unexpected gap appears, and suddenly the focus turns to finding people quickly enough to keep delivery on track.

That approach is understandable. Most programmes are operating under tight commercial and operational pressures, and hiring often competes with dozens of other priorities.

The difficulty is that by the time recruitment becomes urgent, the market has usually already moved.

When I’m talking to clients about a new contractor, the conversation often turns to rates. That’s hardly surprising. Every business has a budget, and every hiring manager wants to know they’re getting good value.

What I’ve learnt over the years, though, is that the cheapest contractor is very rarely the cheapest person to hire.

One of the things I enjoy most about recruitment is that no two days are ever quite the same. One day we might be helping a client find a specialist design engineer for a long-term project. The next, we’re talking to a contractor who’s spent twenty years in the industry and is looking for a new challenge after a project unexpectedly comes to an end.

What always strikes me, though, is how often people think recruitment is simply about matching a CV to a job description.

If only it were that easy.

For years, I’ve heard employers say they’re waiting for the recruitment market to “return to normal”. The problem is, I’m not convinced it ever will.

Engineering has faced skills shortages for decades. As experienced engineers retire, there simply aren’t enough people entering the profession to replace them. Add advances in automation, renewable energy, manufacturing technology and infrastructure projects, and the demand for skilled technical professionals continues to outstrip supply.

That means employers need to think differently about recruitment.

One of the biggest mistakes engineering businesses make is assuming recruitment only begins once a role becomes available.

In reality, the most successful hiring often starts months beforehand.

Whether you’re replacing a retiring engineer, expanding a design team or preparing for a new contract, the businesses that plan ahead almost always have more options available to them than those recruiting under pressure.

When businesses discuss the cost of recruitment, the conversation usually centres around salaries.

Can we afford to pay another £5,000 a year?

Will increasing the salary attract better candidates?

How do we compare with our competitors?

They’re all valid questions, but in my experience they’re not the most important ones.

The biggest cost often comes from hiring the wrong person.

Why would someone leave their current job to come and work for you?

It sounds like an obvious question, but it’s one that surprisingly few businesses stop to consider.

When an engineering company has a vacancy, the natural instinct is to focus on what they’re looking for. The job description is updated, the list of skills is reviewed and the advert is published.

But what does the candidate see?

Engineering recruitment is often driven by an immediate need. A new contract has been won, production needs to increase, a project is falling behind or somebody with a critical skill has handed in their notice. Suddenly, finding another engineer becomes urgent.

That’s perfectly understandable, but I think there’s a danger in recruiting purely to solve the problem sitting in front of you today.

When you’re adding someone to an engineering team, particularly in a permanent role, there’s value in thinking about what the business is likely to need from that person in two or three years’ time. Technology changes, customers change and projects evolve. The engineer who joins to solve today’s requirement may eventually be working on something quite different.

There can sometimes be a perception that contractors are what you use when recruitment hasn’t gone to plan. A project is behind schedule, somebody has unexpectedly left or a permanent vacancy has been open for months, so eventually somebody says, “Can we get a contractor?”

In my view, that rather misses the point.

Used properly, a flexible workforce can be a strategic resource rather than an emergency measure. Engineering businesses frequently experience peaks and troughs in workload. New projects start, development programmes move through different phases and customer demand changes. Building your permanent headcount around the busiest period you might experience isn’t always commercially sensible.

One of the conversations we regularly have with engineering clients starts with a fairly simple question:

“How quickly can you find someone?”

The answer, unfortunately, is usually another question: who exactly are you trying to find?

Because recruiting a CNC machinist, an experienced test engineer, a quality engineer or a specialist automotive development engineer is very different from recruiting into a role where there may be hundreds of potentially suitable candidates within commuting distance.

In technical recruitment, the candidate you want quite often already has a job.

And that changes everything.

There is a slightly unfortunate rule in recruitment: the more urgently somebody needs a new member of staff, the harder it often becomes to recruit them properly. We see it particularly in engineering, where a project has been won, production needs to increase, somebody has unexpectedly resigned or a customer has suddenly brought a programme forward. The phone rings and the message is usually some variation of “we need somebody yesterday”. We understand it, and sometimes circumstances genuinely couldn’t have been predicted, but urgency inevitably changes the recruitment process and not always for the better.

We read a lot of engineering job descriptions. Some are excellent, some look as though they were written ten years ago, saved somewhere on the company server and dragged out every time somebody leaves, and some are essentially a shopping list. You must have this qualification, you must have that experience, you will be responsible for this and you will be expected to do that. Then, right at the bottom, perhaps there are two lines explaining why anybody might actually want the job.

That approach might have worked when employers could reasonably assume there would be a queue of suitably qualified applicants waiting to apply. In many of the specialist engineering markets we recruit within, that simply isn’t the reality anymore. If you are trying to attract an experienced engineer who already has a perfectly good job, the vacancy needs to do considerably more than tell them what you expect from them.

One of the quickest ways to make a difficult engineering vacancy even harder to fill is to insist that every candidate must already have worked in exactly the same industry. Sometimes that’s absolutely necessary. There are roles where specific sector experience, regulatory knowledge, security requirements or technical standards genuinely matter, and in those circumstances previous experience can quite reasonably be an essential part of the brief.

But sometimes “must have automotive experience” really means “the last person had automotive experience”, and those aren’t quite the same thing. When the market for experienced engineers is already tight, automatically excluding everybody who hasn’t worked for precisely the right type of company can reduce a potentially interesting candidate pool to almost nobody.