The UK job market is in an unusual place right now.
Unemployment has risen to 4.6 per cent in the three months prior to May 2025, the highest it has been in four years, but there are 63,000 fewer jobs listed during the same period.
Every profession is trying to combat a recruitment crisis while rising costs make it more difficult to recruit and retain staff at the levels that may have been the previous standard.
While it might seem like employers hold all the cards right now, there are fewer jobs out there and a large number of people fighting for them, it’s not the time to get complacent.
While inexperienced workers may jump at the chance for employment, growing firms need to think more carefully about the environment they create if they want to continue growing.
Our research discovered that a shocking 35 per cent of firms with 10 to 50 employees reported recruitment as a significant obstacle, a rate two to four times higher than smaller firms.
There has to be some connection between a firm’s growth and the recruitment crisis, and we intend to find out what it is so that your firm can scale to meet client demands.
What is causing the recruitment crisis?
Given the current job market chaos, it should be easy to pick up anyone off the street and plonk them in the office.
Small firms manage to start strong with a healthy core team, but something goes wrong along the way.
As a firm grows, it can lose sight of what made it so special in the first place.
As firms grow, they can lose some of the heart and soul that made them great – and that’s when recruitment starts to suffer.
While this might sound like lofty idealism, emerging research does support this view.
Gen Z are now entering the workforce and bringing with them differing attitudes and values.
Like Millennials before them, Gen Z are not content with being faceless drones in a corporate hellscape.
A study by Co-operatives UK found that “63 per cent of Gen Z employees feel conflicted because the company they work for doesn’t make a positive contribution to the local community or society.”
68 per cent of workers also feel that their work is entirely meaningless if it does not provide a positive social impact.
The notion that the culture of the workplace is causing a recruitment crisis is something that has been observed over the past few years.
A far-reaching literature review conducted in 2021 found that employees gain “a sense of identity which increases their commitment to work and ultimately leads to better performance” when employers and employees share “similar beliefs and values, guided by values of consistency, adaptability and an effective communication system.”
The idea of a workplace synergising the values of the employees and the organisation as an effective tool to boost recruitment was confirmed in a more recent systematic review.
Conducted in 2024, the review found that “the development of robust organisational culture strategies” that emphasise “fairness, tolerance, and opportunities for professional growth” as a way to meet the “evolving needs and objectives” of the workforce.
All signs point towards a company’s culture as a key component of recruitment and retention, so the answer to the recruitment crisis lies in establishing and maintaining a good office culture.
How can office culture combat the recruitment crisis?
As your firm starts to grow, you might become concerned that your office culture will inevitably change.
You’re right, it will, but it doesn’t have to change for the worse.
Think about what makes small firms have such a positive culture and what you value most in the workplace.
A feeling of achievement, collaboration, and progress is all core cultural features that can get lost and overlooked as tedious workloads pile up.
Smokeball can streamline your workflow to get your firm back to the dynamic work that made it a great environment in the first place.
No longer will your team have to sift through countless emails, hoping that important information is not slipping through the cracks, as Archie, our AI assistant, is on hand to summarise ongoing conversations.
He can also help generate templates that can be customised based on a client’s case, so that you can be confident that your clients are getting the quality work they deserve.
By using Smokeball to tackle the tedious tasks, you can get back to establishing a work environment that rewards talent and encourages growth.
In short, you can create the kind of work environment you would have wanted when you were starting out.
We cannot solve the wider recruitment crisis, but we can help make your firm a happier workplace.
Make your firm somewhere people want to work. Book a demo today!
