Recruiters are battling almost twice as many applications-per-role as two years before. We unpack what that means for the year ahead, and why this means fairer, faster, better recruitment is more important than ever.
The November budget emphasised a trend recruiters have been struggling with all year, of cautious hiring paired with application surges. Fewer jobs; more jobseekers.
Here’s what that imbalance means for recruiters, candidates, and the hiring function as a whole. (Hint: it doesn’t make life any easier but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.)
The November Budget didn’t land well for employers…
Organisations across the country were waiting with bated breath for November’s budget. Our stats suggest the announcement didn’t land well, triggering a sharper-than-usual contraction in hiring.
Open roles on Tribepad peaked in October 2025 at 122,241 (accounting for pre-Christmas hiring surges) before dropping to 28,102 in November and 24,281 in December. That’s an 80% decrease from pre-Christmas surge to year-end.
By comparison, in 2024 vacancies declined more gradually, falling from 68,232 in September (pre-Christmas hiring a little earlier) to 35,039 in November and 25,478 in December. That’s a fall of 62%.
We see the same pattern if we take an average of September and October compared to November and December, with a decline of 54% in 2024 but 68% in 2025.
The data points to a continued cautious attitude to recruitment, with many teams having to delay or scale back hiring plans.
… but jobseeker demand remained sky-high.
Employer’s might’ve pulled back but our data shows jobseekers definitely didn’t.
Despite the reduction in open roles following the budget, application volumes remained consistently high. In November, candidates submitted 1.25 million applications – up from 1.01 million in December 2024. In December, that figure rose again to 1,32 million – compared to 1.01 million in December 2024 and 748,159 in December 2023.
That means teams in December last year were handling almost twice as many applications per role as they were two years earlier. Twice as many!! Often with smaller teams, too.
This pattern will feel familiar to recruiters. When uncertainty rises, hiring decisions usually slow before candidate behaviour changes. What matters is the gap this creates between opportunity and demand. A gap that doesn’t seem likely to close any time soon, given UK unemployment has hit its highest in five years.
Let’s talk about what that means – for recruiters and your candidates.
Hiring just got (even) harder, for everyone.
When vacancies fall but application volumes stay high, pressure concentrates.
Fewer roles and more candidates competing mean teams are buried under applications for every role. Shortlisting takes longer. Hiring managers battle larger, harder-to-compare candidate pools. Everyone’s recruiting less but juggling more.
Under this kind of pressure, even well-intentioned teams are forced into trade-offs. Consistency becomes harder to maintain. Shortcuts creep in. Candidate experience suffers.
And this pressure isn’t felt evenly. As application volumes climb, the greatest strain falls on the judgement-heavy stages of hiring – screening, shortlisting and communication – where time and attention don’t scale, decisions happen under pressure, and consistency becomes harder to sustain.
That means it becomes more likely that bias re-enters decision-making, good candidates are missed, and trust gets eroded. Quietly, but at scale.
This is why the post-Budget shift matters. Not just because there are fewer roles, but because each role now takes more effort, more judgement and more resilience from the systems underpinning hiring.
What this means for 2026: Better hiring matters even more.
If this pattern continues, recruiters won’t just be asked to do less hiring. They’ll be asked to do harder hiring. (And, you know, recruitment was so easy before. Ha!)
A market with fewer roles and more candidate demand means:
- More scrutiny on your decisions. More people competing for fewer roles puts greater focus on how – and why – you make hiring decisions. (That’s another reason why ethical, transparent AI is so important). Your decision-making needs to stand up scrutiny, internally and externally.
- Less margin for inconsistency. When volumes rise, small inconsistencies scale quickly. Different shortlisting decisions, uneven communication, or unclear processes are felt more sharply and more widely.
- Greater tension between speed and quality. Candidates expect clarity and momentum, but higher application volumes slow screening and shortlisting. The tension between speed and quality becomes harder to manage.
- Candidate experience becomes harder to protect. Longer waits, fewer updates and less transparency are too often by-products of stretched processes. It’s mission-critical you design against that.
- Fairness is harder to sustain, not easier. High volumes increase the risk of shortcuts and bias creeping back in, even in teams with strong values. Recruiters must fight for fair, transparent, inclusive processes.
- Recruiter workload intensifies, even as hiring slows. Fewer roles don’t mean less work. They mean more applications, more decisions, and more pressure to get hiring right. Recruiters risk burn-out, if you’re not already there.
The year ahead looks like one where each hire carries more weight, and where the way hiring is done matters more than ever. There’s less margin for error, and more pressure on teams to recruit right.
So what should recruiters do now?
In this market, “work harder” isn’t a talent acquisition strategy. The teams that hold up best will build hiring processes that can absorb pressure without compromising fairness or candidate experience. That doesn’t require perfection but it does require deliberate design.
Three priorities we think matter most:
- Make decisions easier to justify. Agree what “good” looks like up front and use consistent criteria across roles and reviewers. When scrutiny rises, clarity is protective.
- Protect the judgement-heavy stages. Screening, shortlisting and communication are where pressure’s most intense. Invest there with structure, automation, and shared ways of evaluating candidates.
- Invest in your candidate experience. Fast, consistent communication and slick modern processes aren’t just nice-to-have; they’re how you protect trust and safeguard your brand long-term.
This is exactly where Tribepad sits: helping organisations build hiring infrastructure that stays fair, fast and consistent even when conditions make that difficult. So recruiters can focus on decisions, not admin. And so candidates move through a fast, transparent process they can trust.
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, assessment, video screening, compliance, onboarding, analytics and a fully-integrated AI assistant, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.
B-Corp certified and multiple-award-winning (like Best ATS for Enterprises and Tech Company of the Year), Tribepad is trusted by organisations like Hotel Chocolat, cardfactory, Greggs, Tesco, Subway, DFS, Met Office, and Home Bargains.
