2025 was a wild ride for recruitment. Whether you were buried under a mountain of AI-generated cover letters, trying to perfect your candidate experience, or making a shift towards skills-based hiring, there was no shortage of new trends and ideas for you to process.
With all the change, we can be sure that 2026 will be no different. No one can predict the future, but thankfully there are some experts who can give us their best guess.
We sat down with the 2025 nominees for “In-House Recruitment Leader” at the IHR awards and asked them:
What’s next for recruitment in 2026?
The nominees included:
- Archie Hirson, Head of Talent Acquisition, Newmark
- Mark Kunaseelan, Head of Resourcing, University of the Arts London
- Gareth Bowley, Head of Talent Acquisition, Dorothy House Hospice
- Euan Mcnair, Talent Acquisition, Employer Brand & Inclusion Director, Aegon UK
- Debbie Cole Cole, Head of Resourcing, MBDA
- Charlotte Turton, Group Head of Talent & Onboarding, InHealth
- Trishna Dhillon, Head of Talent Acquisition, The Telegraph
The answers weren’t what we expected.
Trend #1: AI is dead, long live AI
Out: Using AI for the sake of AI
In: Prioritising human touchpoints
When we asked last year, our nominees had mixed opinions about how AI would impact their work in 2026. But the opinions are less mixed a year later.
“I suspect people are going to say AI [is a trend for 2026], which is a looming inevitability,” said Charlotte. “But when I think about InHealth, it’s about using AI so that my team can still be real people in the TA process.”
“While I love tech, I’m a big believer that there’s a point in the process when you’re dealing with people’s careers that needs a personal touch,” she added.
Mark agreed: “I’m predicting a return to more of a human touch, without trying to automate and throw AI at everything. So, sort of a backtrack.”
But everyone recognised that AI and new tech was here to stay, and could have a positive effect if it was used right. “AI is a lot better than it used to be for recruitment, and there are more tools available now,” said Debbie. “The biggest opportunity immediately is by saving time and costs with volume work. It’ll help recruiters and be a good partner in finding new candidates as AI develops. It also comes with challenges and shouldn't be used in isolation.”
As with any tool, finding the balance between time-saving and people-first recruitment is key. “I know when I’m a candidate, I don’t mind a level of automation through the early parts of a process,” said Charlotte. “But I do want to feel like my skills are being evaluated.”
“I think the integration of AI is going to be a difficult journey,” said Trishna. “In-house teams are slowly starting to adopt AI tools but we’re quickly finding it will never fully replace us.”
She went on to add: “It can be a huge partner and benefit for efficiency, but the human element and being able to decipher skills like adaptability and resilience shouldn’t be lost.”
This year, Euan’s team focused on finding ‘moments that matter’ for everyone involved in the hiring process and bringing the human touch back — including manually scheduling over 2,000 interviews. “We’re going against the AI grain a little bit in some areas,” he said, “but we are using it in others with some tools that help us streamline how we work.”
“The moments that matter — we’re keeping them human.”
Trend #2: Internal mobility for the win
Out: Hiring just for today’s need
In: Building employee confidence for better retention
Bringing new candidates into a business is where recruitment and talent teams shine. But one of the biggest shifts is towards internal mobility: either upskilling existing workforces, or making sure that when you hire, the skills new employees bring into the business will allow them to tackle new roles and challenges as they come up.
“It saves on costs, time to hire — and everything else, actually,” said Mark. “There’s always going to be that organisational knowledge gap and time to get started for new candidates. If they’re internal, they’ve got significantly reduced ramp-up time.”
But how do you build the capacity for internal mobility?
“You’ve got to engage with leadership, and with the data,” said Archie. “You can’t stop everybody leaving. But getting leadership to understand that if we’ve got opportunities here — which we always do — why wouldn’t we use the individuals we’ve invested in?”
While it’s a cultural change that won’t happen overnight, even one example of successful internal mobility helps you tell the story of why it’s beneficial for the business and gives others the confidence to look for more internal opportunities themselves.
It also means changing the way you hire and moving towards attributes-based hiring over technical skills. “Having strong relationships between recruiters and hiring managers really helps, as does making sure that your hiring managers are well-versed in recruitment best practices,” said Gareth.
“At some point in the future, interviews will probably focus more on attributes, proving training and development for technical skills during the role. An application might demonstrate core qualifications or technical skills needed for a role, such as being a registered nurse, with interviews becoming more informal and focusing on a persons attributes, experiences, and core values."
At InHealth, their biggest team shifts were around skills. When they had trouble recruiting endoscopy nurses, a talent partner came with the idea of internal training to help plug the gap rather than looking externally.
“It widens your candidate pool if you’re prepared to do a level of upskilling when people enter the business,” said Charlotte. “It’s been an absolute success. Does it take slightly longer to get there? Yes. But once you’ve got momentum, you’ve got a pipeline, and there are a load of complimentary skills we know translate really well.”
Internal mobility isn’t just good for companies, either: it’s great for employees and communities. When he was working on the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Euan sourced talent from around the world and saw what getting a job meant to employees and their families. “There was a big aspect about leaving a legacy,” he said. “Could we upskill the workforce and leave some of the knowledge behind?”
Today, Glasgow is renowned for putting on great events, and the Commonwealth Games is coming back. “We upskilled a number of people that are going to then work on it again, which is nice,” said Euan. “Getting a job can change people’s lives, and we should hold on to the fact that we can make such a positive difference.”
Trend #3: EVP = storytelling
Out: Cookie cutter employer branding
In: Authentic storytelling that makes a splash
Euan’s experience at the Commonwealth Games wasn’t just about making sure employees could do their jobs. “It changed my perspective on employer brand and attraction,” he said. Trying to convince employees to move to a new city or country for a temporary contract wasn’t easy.
“I asked if we had an employer brand, and the answer was no — but now I owned it. It was great to be totally empowered and do something really cool.” He combined recruitment with the psychology of hiring to bring in exceptional talent on short-term contracts. “How good does your sell need to be to get someone to change their career? It was the legacy that can be left with good hiring and what a difference it made to an organisation, a city, and a country, ultimately.”
“The role of an internal recruiter is really a business partner, strategist, and authentic storyteller,” said Archie. “People want to feel happy, and if you can connect with individuals in an authentic way, that’s going to make the difference — and that’s what I’m excited about.”
“Our EVP has grown out of the talent acquisition team, and we really had to work hard with the business to formulate the right propositions,” said Debbie. “We conducted employee surveys across our whole Group in Europe to understand their brand feedback about the business and how they felt to help us better tell a story of who we are. From that we were able to turn it into something others externally could engage with too.”
The result? “We now have more employer brand consistency throughout our Group. Each individual country has their own culture that needs to be represented, so coming up with the EVP has been challenging, but it’s been really well received and is making a difference.”
“We invested massively in our careers site, and asked ourselves: What do we stand for?” said Trishna. “What you’ll see is that the diversity of our talent really shines through. We wanted to show who works for us and why — we’ve had some really big ambitions about what kind of a diverse workforce we want, and we continually track that, and have taken on board what people say about us.”
With employer branding being a big focus for a lot of companies, there’s also room for teams to do something different: “In the last three or four years, I’ve seen lots of people improving on their storytelling, EVP, and employer brand,” said Mark. “But there comes a point where it’s a lot of the same. I think we could see a few companies taking a big, bold approach to authentic storytelling, or there’ll be a shift in the way stories are told.”
In Newmark’s graduate program, they leaned heavily on the experience of employees to communicate with new talent, sharing real photos and stories in an always-on campaign that combined media, marketing, and recruitment. “We also included an outtake reel, which moves it away from that rigid corporate feel to a much more human experience,” Archie said.
“All of the graduates that we offered jobs to accepted. And when we went back to them, they all said that they felt valued by the business, and they enjoyed the opportunity to meet people and get a proper feel of what the business was like.”
Trend #4: All the data
Out: Making decisions based on vibes
In: Backing up strategic recruitment with numbers
Even with the best EVP, strategic recruitment can’t happen without one key piece of information: the data.
All of our nominees said that they closely tracked numbers, not only for their own decision-making process but also to communicate the value of their strategies to leadership.
“The way I do everything is based on data and fact,” said Trishna. “You cannot assume in recruitment. If you’ve got great data, you can use it to forecast and actually build a recruitment strategy that supports the business.”
When it comes to numbers that matter, Archie, Charlotte, and Gareth all said that quality of hire was the number one metric they were tracking heading into 2026.
“It’s about the difference that person makes when they walk through the door, and how long they’re able to make that difference for,” said Charlotte. “How do they integrate? How do they perform? When we’re starting to link that with onboarding and early engagement data, we’re looking for forward indicators. I want to be able to look at things and know that I’ve got strong indicators about how that person is going to perform.”
Gareth added, “It’s not just in terms of the individual’s performance but also retention and cultural contribution, particularly in leadership roles. That’s helped us ensure that feedback from our new starters shapes our direction, and gives us a stronger cultural and technical understanding of what our departments need.”
As far as measurement goes, “speed and cost absolutely matter. But quality is what drives business outcomes, and validates recruitment as a strategic function,” said Archie. “We measure that through performance, achieving expectations within 12 months, and, of course, retention.”
There are lots of ways to track quality of hire, but they all agreed that a mix of qualitative and quantitative data was best. Performance reviews, interviews, surveys and other data points all combined into one metric to keep their focus clear.
Outside of quality of hire, you can’t ignore the numbers, either. “We track cost per hire, the ROI of suppliers and the support that we receive, and track it against our team,” said Debbie. “With inflation and supplier prices going up, we have to make sure that we’re adding value to the business.”
Her calculations for cost per hire are based on an agreed budget after looking at previous and predicted future spend. The cost of suppliers, inflation, marketing spend, and ROI for the tools they use all get wrapped up in that one number.
Instead of focusing on quality of hire, Mark looks at factors like internal mobility rate, hiring manager satisfaction, and candidate satisfaction. “Time to impact is one that’s not measured but I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he said. “If you shift to more of an internal mobility approach, the ramp-up time is going to be much less. Looking at how you measure that is going to be an important metric for 2026.”
Looking ahead: How to succeed as a recruiter in 2026
“It can be quite easy to get caught up in recruitment trends,” said Gareth. “Every recruitment company is trying to discover the next big thing. We need to take a step back sometimes and better understand what our organisations need, and what job seekers across the UK are actually looking for.”
Recruitment isn’t one-size-fits-all, and what’s a trend in 2026 might not serve your business now or even in the future. Being able to pick and choose what you focus on and keep your goals front and centre is the key to success — no matter what everyone else around you is doing.
Or, as Euan put it: “TA has never been as important as it is now: it’s a real strategic centre. If we’re connected and if we’re curious, we can add significant value.”
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