Permanent hiring in technology has become a two-speed market. Some companies are hiring with real intent, others have gone quiet, and the difference between them is sharper than it has been for years.
Nathan Connolly, CEO of Consortia, works on permanent searches across the UK, US, Europe and the UAE. We put nine questions to him about the state of the permanent market in July 2026: who is really hiring, what the best people are paid, where searches break down, and what to expect by January 2027.
A condensed version of these insights lives on our Permanent Recruitment page and is refreshed quarterly. This is the full conversation.
Who is hiring permanently right now, and who has quietly stopped?
Two kinds of company are still hiring permanently, and on the surface they look quite different.
The first is riding the AI wave. They're either an AI business themselves, AI-adjacent, or they benefit directly from AI, and they're bringing serious new features to market. The second is the company that has looked at its own team and admitted it doesn't have the skills in-house, so it's hiring AI product managers, AI engineers and forward deployed engineers. They could take those people on a fractional or contract basis, but more and more are choosing permanent, because they've accepted this shift isn't going away and their product has to keep pace.
There's a third group I'd single out, because the uptick there is significant. Almost always these are businesses that had fallen behind technologically and are now changing, whether through new leadership, funding or acquisition. Picture a software company with a brilliant brand and reputation that historically delivered its product as a bespoke service, deployed individually to each client it served, and is now backed to turn that into a SaaS platform. That platform shift is the pattern. Whether they're self-funded or backed by acquisition, private equity or venture capital, companies that were a strong standalone product are being pushed to become platforms, and they're hiring to do it.
Geographically, the US keeps hiring permanent staff aggressively. We're also seeing hiring across Europe, often from US or UK businesses that have retained some remote hiring, much reduced but still there, and have worked out they can access strong people at lower salaries.
So what separates the companies still hiring from the ones that have gone still? An AI thesis and capital behind a change agenda. If a business has a clear reason to believe AI changes its product, or fresh money and a mandate to modernise, it's in the market. If it has neither, it's technologically behind and treading water, and it's the one that has stopped, quietly.
Which roles are moving fastest, and which have gone cold?
The clearest cold spot is user experience and design. Demand there has dropped sharply. There are still pockets, but the role actually being hired now is a replacement or a founding designer. "Founding product designer" is far more common than it was. We're nowhere near the rate of design hiring we've seen historically.
I put that down to two things. Funding levels have changed, and the UX designers already on teams have become much more efficient. Figma and the tooling around it, plus the design systems and guidelines already in place, mean they build faster than ever. And user research stays low, which continues to frustrate strong UX practitioners and product managers with a research background, but the reality is research still isn't a priority for most companies.
What's moving fastest: product managers with heavy AI or technical knowledge. Product builders, by which I mean AI engineers who can use tools like Claude and Codex to massively increase their output, but who also have a genuine product mindset. They'll talk to customers, understand user needs, and build quickly while keeping one clear eye on the overall product. And anyone who has worked in an AI-native environment, whether that's an organisation that has been AI-driven from day one or a product that gives someone a route into that world.
The other split worth naming is seniority, particularly in the UK. There's a reduction in salaries at leadership level and an almost complete absence of roles at the junior end. Juniors can't even step up into mid-weight. That backs up the whole ladder: mid-weight people start making sideways moves instead of upward ones, and the blockage works its way right through the career food chain.
What's happening to salaries?
At the very top of the in-demand roles, clients will pay at the highest levels for the best people, and that willingness has held. In the US, where equity isn't on the table, we're seeing $300,000 to $400,000 for those roles, scaling down as equity comes into the package.
The UK is a different story. Salaries at leadership level have come down over the last twelve months, and the junior end has largely disappeared, which compresses the whole structure. People move sideways rather than up, because there's nothing above or below pulling the market along.
Europe, meanwhile, is increasingly where UK, US and UAE businesses go to access strong people at lower cost. A lot of the European demand we see is remote hiring driven by exactly that salary difference.
How has AI changed what clients ask for?
The sharpest change is in engineering interviews. As recently as twelve to sixteen months ago, clients were telling us they didn't want AI used in the interview at all. Now they want the opposite. Developers are asked to show how they code with agents alongside them, how they build guardrails, what their approach is. AI is at the centre of the assessment. There are still regulated environments that stay cautious, but with better agent infrastructure, from companies like Vercel that a lot of the more forward-thinking businesses are building on, the default assumption now is that AI will be used, and that it's a core part of the job.
Where it has created a real problem is take-home tasks. If the exercise is, say, a presentation, anyone who can use Claude or a similar tool can embed it into their workflow and spin something up extremely fast. The client often can't tell what the candidate actually did themselves versus what was produced by someone who simply has the tokens or the know-how. In product especially, a take-home now comes down largely to the strength of someone's prompting. The counter-argument, and I have some sympathy for it, is that if those same tools are available to them in the actual job, and they've reached the right level of output and can defend the work live in the room, then maybe those are exactly the right hires for the future.
On job specs, this is why Consortia pushes so hard for direct access to the line manager. When a candidate works with us, they know we've spoken to the actual hiring manager and understand what's really behind the role. It's far too easy for a spec to be spun up by someone else on the team and carry inaccuracies. Clients understand why we insist on it.
Where do hiring processes fall apart?
Clients think they're firmly in control. They read in the press that people are still being made redundant, so the assumption is that if you're the one offering a job, whether in the US, UK, EU or UAE, you're king. The reality is that everyone is still fishing in the same narrow pool of genuinely high-calibre candidates, and that's where processes break.
The specific failure is speed. Offers are coming through faster than clients expect, so if you run a long, drawn-out loop you lose the strongest people before you reach the end. That still surprises a lot of hiring teams, and it's the exact dynamic that nearly cost a recent Austin search, which I'll come to.
Counter-offers are less of an issue overall, but there's one emerging pattern: people who are already AI-enabled in their current role, whose salary hasn't kept pace with the impact they can now have. When those people resign, we're seeing employers backtrack with an eleventh-hour counter-offer to keep them. My advice to candidates is unchanged. Don't take it. We're yet to see good evidence that counter-offers work out in the long run.
What are candidates doing differently to a year ago?
The biggest change is hybrid working, and it's not the direction people assume. There's a stronger pull back towards the office than at any point since COVID. We've researched this in depth for our hybrid working report, but in short: at mid-senior to leadership level, candidates themselves are now looking for two to three days a week in the office.
That has a real consequence. It shrinks the search radius. If people want to be in two or three days, you're hiring from a more local pool. That's a big advantage for US companies willing to look across state lines, and in the UK the firms hiring in and around London are finding that strong talent, while in higher demand, is more readily available to them.
The flip side is the red line. Candidates have moved from expecting fully remote, or one day in, to accepting three. But pushing to four or five days genuinely limits who's interested, and therefore how wide you can cast the net. Companies mandating full-time office attendance need to understand that trade-off.
What's the most common mistake hiring managers are making?
Time. And I don't just mean the usual summer-into-autumn slowdown. Right now, companies are hesitating: waiting to see one more candidate, or sitting on someone already in process and being slow to book the next stage. The result is entirely predictable. A large number of candidates go off the market and get hired by the businesses that moved quicker. In this market, speed is the single biggest thing hiring managers are getting wrong.
The search that stuck: an AI engineer in Austin
A permanent search for an AI engineer in Austin. The client wanted someone in the office five days a week, for what's already an extremely rare skill set, and on top of that someone who'd come from a fast-growing, VC-backed business and understood their industry. We looked locally, but five days a week was always going to be the sticking point.
What got it over the line was relaxing that to two days in the office and three remote. The moment we did, they secured someone very quickly: a person who could drive in from much further outside the city, who has since started and is already making an impact.
The honest lesson, from conversations with the company afterwards, is that they could have been shipping sooner if they'd relaxed it earlier. The five-days mandate wasn't specific to this role. It was a single blanket policy applied to everyone, and even for a hyper-niche hire it took VP and leadership sign-off to lift. This person turned out to be critical to the business and simply couldn't be secured locally, which is exactly why one-size-fits-all office policies cost you your most important hires.
What does permanent hiring look like by January 2027?
Through to January 2027, I expect the US to stay buoyant across our markets: UX, product, data and engineering. That doesn't look like changing.
The UK stays much quieter. Job flow is coming back, but nowhere near previous levels, and there's a general nervousness to hiring. Of all our markets, the UK is the one where a business losing a team member now genuinely asks whether to replace them at all, versus using AI agents, enabling the existing team better, or changing the structure instead.
Europe holds up, but the demand is largely UK, US and UAE businesses hiring remote staff there to take advantage of lower salaries. Germany is the exception: movement has all but stopped, which tracks with how weak the wider German economy has been. And the UAE remains exceptionally hard for local top-tier tech talent, so companies there keep looking to the rest of the world to fill the gap.
Net: a two-speed market. The US pulling forward, the UK cautious and increasingly willing to answer a vacancy with automation rather than a hire, and everyone still hunting the same narrow band of AI-fluent people.
If you're planning a permanent hire in any of these markets, talk to us. We'll tell you honestly what the market looks like for your role, your location and your office policy.