Growth, respect and reputation: what's changing

Three things we’re seeing in the market right now

We talk to hiring businesses and candidates across Executive Search and Interim Management every day, and three things keep coming up. None of them are new ideas on their own, but what’s changed is how sharply they’re showing up right now.

1. The cycle has turned

For the past couple of years, some of the businesses we work with have been in survival mode: lean teams, tight headcount, contracts delivered by people doing the job of two or three because it was the only way the numbers worked.

That’s shifting, not because the world has suddenly settled down, but because businesses have stopped waiting for it to. The roles landing on our desks have moved. A year ago, most briefs were about keeping the lights on: operational leadership, contract delivery, margin protection. Now the weight has swung towards growth, business development, bid capability, the people who can win the next contract rather than just run the current one. Some of that is private equity money pushing portfolio businesses to grow faster than a traditional listed company would. Some of it is simpler than that: business owners deciding they’re done waiting to see what the world does next.

There’s a catch: the pipeline underneath that growth is thinner than it should be. Good people are moving between the same handful of competitors at senior level, but there isn’t enough fresh talent coming through to replace them further down. Part of that is a genuine skills gap. Part of it is that entry-level roles have taken the hit from the same efficiency drive that’s now easing off higher up. techUK, citing Adzuna data, reports that UK entry-level job postings are down 30% since ChatGPT launched, and the Institute of Student Employers forecast a 7% cut in graduate hiring for 2025/26, although techUK is clear that AI is only part of the story. Businesses serious about growth need to think about where their next generation of leaders is actually coming from, not just who they can poach this year.

The public sector adds its own layer. Bids into government and the NHS aren’t going away. Facilities management, defence, justice and transport all still need delivering, whatever else is happening in Westminster. The Government Commercial Agency exists precisely because that pipeline of contracts is constant. The businesses winning that work early are building commercial and bid capability now, ahead of the next wave of tenders, not scrambling for it once the invitation to tender lands.

2. Can’t play, won’t play, don’t play

Senior hiring has split into two very different candidate experiences, and neither one looks like a job board.

The first group can’t play the game. They’re experienced, often passive candidates who won’t apply through an ATS, sit an automated video interview, or work their way through a chatbot screen, and that’s not stubbornness so much as a mismatch between how they built their careers and how the process now expects them to show up. The Economist put it plainly this year: recruiters have been hit by a tsunami of AI generated applications, and the tools built to manage that flood have made the process harder for exactly the people this market most needs to find.

The second group won’t play the game. They’re equally capable, and unwilling to tolerate being treated like a number: if a process goes quiet on them, or takes three weeks to reply, they move on and they don’t come back.

Willingness to jump through every hoop in an impersonal process says more about someone’s tolerance for being messed about than anything else. People with options simply choose not to engage with a process that doesn’t respect their time, and a process built like an obstacle course rarely reflects well on the business running it.

Underneath both groups sits a longer standing problem. Job specifications keep getting longer and more specific, and while clear expectations help, a long list of narrow must-haves works less like a brief and more like a reason to say no.

It also changes who applies. The line most often quoted on this, from a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, is that men apply when they meet 60% of the requirements and women only when they meet all of them. The exact figures are debated, but the pattern holds up in more recent research. Harvard Business School’s Katherine Coffman found that when an advert was vague, only 6% of qualified women applied against 22% of qualified men, and that spelling out exactly what the role needs narrowed the difference. Research from Stanford’s Clayman Institute points the same way: in simulated applications, women wanted to meet a higher share of the listed requirements than men before applying, and the gap nearly disappeared when adverts emphasised learning and development.

There is a whole piece to be written on what that means for how businesses hire, and we will come back to it.

3. Reputation has never been more important

This isn’t a new idea, but it’s carrying a lot more weight right now than it used to.

For businesses, reputation now sits alongside, or at least level with, salary and title in a candidate’s decision. Senior people ask whether a contract is deliverable, whether the culture will look after them, and whether the move is good for their own reputation, as well as what the package looks like. Research from Midnight this year found that 19% of candidates have chosen not to apply for a role because of an employer’s reputation and 15% have turned down an offer for the same reason. A business known for difficult contracts or high turnover may find its best prospects have already heard enough to say no.

For candidates, the same logic runs in reverse, in a market this small and connected, where everybody who matters tends to know everybody else. How someone handles a process they don’t get, whether they stay professional through a rejection, whether they’re someone a recruiter would put forward again: all of that follows them, often further than they’d expect.

The World Economic Forum has been tracking the same shift from a different angle. As AI makes most job applications look equally polished, it argues, ‘who you know may start to matter more than how well you prompt.’ A referral carries something an application never can, someone willing to put their own name behind it.

For us at Grichan Whitestone, it’s the clearest proof of all. The vast majority of our work comes through referral and reputation rather than outreach, and that’s not down to chance. It reflects how we treat people, whether they get the job or not, and that is remembered in a market this small.

If any of this matches what you’re seeing, we’d be interested to hear it.

Sources
• techUK, ‘What’s actually happening with entry-level and graduate jobs?’, November 2025, citing Adzuna and the Institute of Student Employers
• Government Commercial Agency, formerly the Crown Commercial Service
• The Economist, on the ‘tsunami of AI-generated applications’
• Harvard Business Review, ‘Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified’, Tara Sophia Mohr, 2014
• Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, ‘Breaking Through the Self-Doubt That Keeps Talented Women from Leading’, 2024
• Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Research, ‘Uncovering the gendered dimensions of job hunting’, Fiona Lee, 2018
• Midnight, ‘One in five candidates reject jobs over employer reputation’, May 2026
• World Economic Forum, on human connection as a hiring advantage