New UK labour market data released this week confirms something Northamptonshire commercial and office employers have been feeling for a while: the old hiring formula isn’t working anymore.
Indeed’s latest Hiring Lab report shows demand for AI and automated tools has hit 9.4% of all UK job postings – a record high. At the same time, graduate job postings are down 7% year-on-year, sitting at their lowest level for this time of year since 2020.
Put those two numbers side by side and you get a shift in how commercial, marketing and business support roles need to be resourced.
The Problem: Fewer Graduates, Higher Skill Expectations
For years, commercial hiring leaned on a fairly reliable pipeline: bring in graduates, train them up, build capability over time. That pipeline is thinning. Fewer graduate roles are being advertised, and the ones that remain are competing for a shrinking pool of employers still willing to hire on potential alone.
Meanwhile, the skills employers are actually asking for have moved on. Business support, marketing and commercial job specs increasingly expect candidates to be comfortable with AI-assisted tools and automated workflows – CRM automation, AI-supported reporting, content and data tools that didn’t feature in a job spec three years ago.
Degree-based hiring assumes a slower-moving skills environment. The current market isn’t giving anyone that luxury.
The Business Impact
For hiring managers, this shows up as a very practical problem: roles staying open longer because the traditional graduate route isn’t delivering candidates who can hit the ground running.
- Teams end up absorbing the gap while a role sits vacant, which puts pressure on existing staff and slows output.
- CVs that tick the qualification box often don’t reflect what the role actually needs day to day.
- Businesses that keep filtering purely on degree requirements are competing for a smaller applicant pool, while the practical skills that matter go unassessed.
- Training investment gets swallowed correcting for skills gaps that could have been screened for at the shortlist stage.
None of this is a candidate-quality problem. It’s a filtering problem; the criteria being used to screen candidates haven’t caught up with the market producing them.
Where This Is Going: Skills-First Hiring
The shift already underway across the UK is toward skills-first hiring: assessing what someone can actually do with the tools your business relies on, rather than what qualification sits on their CV. For commercial, marketing and business support roles specifically, that means prioritising:
- Practical fluency with the software and automated tools your team already uses
- Evidence of adaptability – can this person pick up a new system quickly, not just describe one they’ve used before
- Commercial awareness, even without a formal business qualification behind it
- Communication and problem-solving ability, which no AI tool replaces
This isn’t about lowering the bar. If anything, it raises it because you’re screening for capability that shows up in performance, not capability that shows up on paper.
How Impact Recruitment Approaches This
We don’t send CVs against a checklist. When we brief a commercial or business support role, we’re asking what “good” actually looks like operationally – which tools this person needs to be productive on day one, and where a strong hire can plug a skills gap even without the traditional qualifications attached.
That’s a deliberately more thorough process than a keyword search against a job title. It’s also why our shortlists tend to be shorter and more relevant – we’d rather send two candidates who can do the job than ten who look right on paper.
For Northamptonshire businesses hiring into commercial, marketing or business support roles, the practical takeaway from this week’s data is straightforward: the graduate pipeline you relied on is smaller, and the qualifications-first filter is screening out people who could do the job well. Widening the criteria to focus on practical, tool-based skills gets roles filled faster, with people who are ready for the work in front of them.
If your team is finding office and commercial roles are taking longer to fill than they used to, it’s probably worth reviewing your criteria. Call our team if for an honest conversation about your position in the current market and if we can be of support.
Impact Recruitment is a Northamptonshire-based recruitment consultancy specialising in Commercial, Industrial, Supply Chain, and Technical & Engineering hiring. Get in touch to talk through your current commercial hiring challenges.
