Fix Your Hiring in 2027 and Beyond

There is a particular type of sentence I hear with depressing regularity: 

“There just aren’t any good candidates out there.” 

It is a defeatist statement which, at best, is only sometimes and only ever partly true. 

Partly true because, yes, sometimes the person you want isn’t sitting on a job board waiting for your advert to appear. Good, talented, experienced estate agents, lettings professionals and property managers are often, quite sensibly, getting on with their careers, not spending their Tuesday lunchtimes browsing vacancies. 

But sometimes – and I do say this with love – it is not your candidates who are the problem. 

It is your hiring process. 

The recruitment market has changed dramatically over the past few years – not least with the Employment Rights Act 2025 being implemented throughout 2026 and 2027.  

Nevertheless, many businesses still try to recruit using processes that would have looked perfectly normal in 2019. 

Job title, no real spec. 

Insert desired number of years’ experience here. 

Hide or avoid mentioning the salary. 

Post an advert. Wait in hope. 

Interview three times. 

Take a fortnight to make a decision. 

Then act surprised when the good candidate has disappeared. 

If you want to fix your hiring in 2027 and beyond, the first thing you need to accept is that recruitment is no longer an administrative task that begins when somebody hands in their notice.  

Not simply recruitment, but talent acquisition. It is a business discipline. 

And it should be treated like one. 

 

Stop searching for unicorns 

We need to talk about job descriptions – because some of them are terrifying. 

Someone sets out to look for a senior negotiator but, by the time they’ve thought about what other jobs they could feasibly be asked to take on, and perhaps by the time everyone else in the organisation has added their requirements to cover what they need, the job spec looks like somebody who can negotiate sales, value a property, win instructions, self-start, lead a team, produce TikToks, understand compliance, be familiar with at least two CRM systems… and if possible, could they also rewire the kettle? 

All for £28,000 plus commission. 

Good luck. 

One of the important changes businesses can make is to separate what a candidate must already know from what you could reasonably teach them. 

Recruitment is becoming more skills-focused across the wider employment market. LinkedIn's UK recruitment research found that 93% of talent acquisition professionals regard accurately assessing skills as important to improving quality of hire. 

The property sector should certainly be thinking the same way. 

If somebody has brilliant sales instincts, exceptional communication skills and understands intrinsically how to build relationships, do they really need three years working with your particular CRM? 

In fact, if somebody has managed customers through difficult situations in hospitality, retail, automotive or professional services, could those skills not transfer into agency? 

Sometimes, they absolutely can. And not just in agency, but across the property sector in general, from conveyancing and mortgage advice to Build to Rent (BTR) and Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA). 

Experience might matter – but is it direct experience of the job that makes the difference, or is it broad experience of solving similar problems, in a sector agnostic way? 

This is not saying that experience doesn’t matter. But we need to get better at distinguishing between experience that is essential and experience that makes onboarding easier. 

Because if your ideal candidate specification describes a sum total of six people in Britain, you’re not looking at a shortage of talent. 

You've simply written a near impossible brief. 

 

Decide what you want before you start interviewing 

This sounds painfully obvious – but the opposite happens too often to assume it is. 

Businesses advertise one role, interview for another and eventually hire somebody to do something slightly different again. 

Then everyone wonders why it hasn't worked. 

Before you recruit, ask some fairly boring but extremely useful questions. 

What problem are we actually trying to solve? What does this person need to achieve in their first six months? Which skills are genuinely non-negotiable? Which ones can we develop? What type of person succeeds in our environment? 

And, perhaps most importantly, why would somebody good want this job? 

That last question is overlooked with frightening frequency. 

Businesses spend an enormous amount of time asking candidates to prove why they deserve the role, while offering remarkably little explanation of why the candidate should want it. 

Recruitment is a two-way sales process and it really helps to remember that. 

You are assessing them. 

But good candidates are absolutely assessing you. 

 

Please tell people what you are paying 

This is definitely where I make myself unpopular with somebody. But that’s OK, I'll cope. 

Salary secrecy looks increasingly ridiculous. 

Indeed's 2026 UK research found that 58% of job postings do already include salary information. That means, on balance, candidates are becoming accustomed to knowing what a job pays before investing time in an application. 

And why shouldn't they? 

Nobody goes into Tesco, puts a week's shopping through the checkout and says, “I'm sure we'll agree on a figure if we're the right cultural fit.” 

Or for an example closer to the property sphere, people typically know the price of a home they are booking to view. 

People have mortgages, rent, childcare, commuting costs and lives. They need to know the job they are applying for can meet their requirements. 

If you genuinely have flexibility depending on experience, at the very least, publish a sensible range. 

What no longer works particularly well is to ask candidates what their salary expectations are. It still happens, and it will continue to happen – but you’re in the property game, so you know that this is like asking a seller the minimum they would take. It doesn’t tend to lead to an honest answer, and it definitely runs the risk of alienating the candidate (and in the case of the analogy, the homeowner) if not handled the right way. 

Transparency on salary, therefore, is good. It saves everybody time. 

That includes transparency about commission and targets, but also working arrangements and progression. 

The fewer surprises somebody discovers after joining you, the better your chances of keeping them. 

Which brings us neatly to another inconvenient truth. 

 

Recruit with retention in mind 

If you're constantly hiring because good people keep leaving, recruitment may not be your biggest problem. 

It might just be retention. 

There is no point pouring more water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. 

So before launching another recruitment campaign, look at why people leave your business. 

Do they feel developed? Are managers actually managing? Can people see what progression looks like? Are targets achievable? Is the remuneration still competitive? Do your best performers feel valued, or do they mainly receive another target every time they hit the previous one? 

Exit interviews are particularly useful here, but many owners actively avoid them. And of course they come with an obvious disadvantage: the person has already exited. 

But if they reveal real problems, you can now choose whether or not they deserve to be addressed. 

Nevertheless, better still is to talk to the people you want to keep before they start talking to us. 

 

Speed matters 

There is a difference between making a considered recruitment decision and moving at the speed of a tectonic plate.  

Good candidates are highly unlikely to exist exclusively in your recruitment process. 

If the candidate is actively looking, they could be speaking to several potential employers. Even if they aren't actively looking, even if you have approached them, just the nature of your approach is likely to pique their interest enough to just scan around to see what opportunities are out there. You do not need seven stakeholders to approve a branch manager. 

Also, think about the stages you are setting, and how long it takes to move the applicant from start to finish. If somebody is applying for a negotiator's job, do you need to recreate The Apprentice over four interviews? 

It is important to build a robust recruitment process, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be long-winded. Make sure it is thorough enough to protect the business, but simple enough to maintain momentum. 

Know who is making the decision. 

Schedule interviews quickly. 

Give feedback quickly. 

Make offers quickly. 

And if somebody isn't right, be fair and tell them quickly. 

 

Don’t think a job advert is a recruitment strategy 

Our 2026 UK Property Recruitment Market Report found that more than half of agencies receive fewer than five qualified applicants for a vacancy. 

That tells us something.  

Simply putting a vacancy online and waiting for the CVs to arrive isn't enough. Or at least, you are leaving a lot to chance. 

And actually, many of the best people in property are not job hunting. 

They need approaching. Carefully. 

They may need convincing. 

They might be perfectly happy where they are; so if somebody presents an opportunity, it needs to be genuinely more interesting. 

This is talent acquisition, and it means that businesses need to think about recruitment all year round, rather than starting from zero whenever somebody resigns. 

Build relationships. 

Know who your future managers might be, what their experience looks like and what their profile is telling you. 

Keep in touch with good candidates. 

Think about succession. 

Develop your existing people. 

Work with recruiters who genuinely know your market rather than treating recruitment as an emergency purchase made when a desk becomes empty. 

You wouldn't start looking for buyers for your agency the week before you wanted to sell it (if that’s your plan, you really need to speak to Joel and Paul). 

Talent should be no different. 

 

Use AI, but don’t outsource your judgement 

We can't talk about hiring beyond 2026 without talking about AI. 

It is already changing recruitment. 

AI can potentially help write job adverts, search databases, summarise applications, schedule interviews and remove a mountain of repetitive administration. 

Excellent. Use it. 

I do. 

But there is a danger that businesses become so excited about automating recruitment – excited and perhaps over-reliant – that they automate the human bit out of it. 

Recruitment is ultimately about understanding people. 

A CV doesn't always tell you the story behind why somebody wants to leave. 

An algorithm won't necessarily understand that the candidate whose experience looks slightly unconventional might be precisely the person who will transform your team. 

AI should make recruiters and hiring managers better at spending time with people, not give them an excuse to avoid doing so. 

Automate administration; but do not automate that innate human quality: curiosity. 

 

Stop waiting for perfect 

This may be the hardest habit to break. There is always a temptation to think the next CV might be better, so hiring businesses keep looking. 

And looking. 

And looking. 

Meanwhile, that very good candidate who met 85% of the brief has accepted another job. 

Of course you shouldn't lower your standards – it’s not about that. But it is about judgement, not box-ticking. 

Perhaps the person who has already done the identical job for your identical competitor is exactly what you need. 

But sometimes the better hire is the person with the capability, attitude and ambition to grow into it. 

Knowing the difference is what good recruitment is about. 

 

Fix the process before blaming the market 

Hiring is difficult. 

I run a recruitment business, so believe me, I really would quite like there to be a limitless queue of outstanding property professionals actively looking for their next role. 

But there isn't. 

The businesses that recruit well don't simply have better luck. 

They know what they are looking for. They understand what they have to offer. They move quickly and in a focussed and deliberate way. They communicate properly. They recruit for transferable skills as well as experience. They nurture talent – both internally and externally – and they recognise that recruitment doesn't become important because Dave handed his notice in. 

In a sector like property, there is another analogy we could think of. 

This is an industry that loves to talk about pipelines. 

Sales pipelines. 

Lettings pipelines. 

New-business pipelines. 

So why not become equally serious about your people pipeline.  

If you want to know how to hire for 2027 and beyond, that is a key part of the solution. The businesses that fix their hiring now won't just fill today's vacancies more effectively. 

They will be better equipped to find, develop and keep the people they need for whatever the market throws at them next.