September Recruitment Is an Opportunity (Don’t Waste It!)
September always feels like a bit of a reset in recruitment.
Summer holidays are coming to an end, teams are getting back into the swing of things and attention starts turning to what needs to be achieved before the end of the year.
And let’s not forget seasonal recruitment. Is it too early to discuss Christmas? I think not. Retail and logistics, I’m looking at you.
But it doesn’t stop there. Hospitality is heading towards the Christmas party and events season. Manufacturing and food production feel the knock-on effect of everything retail is preparing to sell. Customer service teams are gearing up for the inevitable increase in orders, queries, deliveries and returns.
Then there’s care and healthcare. Winter brings a completely different kind of pressure, but the need to have the right people in place is just as important.
Education has its own September story too. Pupils return, staffing plans meet the reality of the new academic year and schools quickly discover where they need additional teachers, supply cover, SEND specialists and classroom support. The wider recruitment challenge hasn’t disappeared either. NFER’s 2026 teacher workforce research found that 71% of secondary school leaders and 49% of primary school leaders still considered recruiting teachers difficult.
The point is, recruitment gathers pace from here. September isn’t the warm-up. For a lot of employers, it’s when the work for the next six months starts.
But there’s a danger in assuming that more candidate activity means you simply need to advertise more jobs.
The real opportunity is to use that activity better.
Start with the roles you actually need to fill
I see you rolling your eyes, thinking, surely we need to fill all of them?
Yes. But that doesn’t mean every vacancy needs the same amount of attention, budget or recruitment activity.
If you’ve got 50 live jobs, some will generate applications without much help. Others need additional visibility. Some will attract plenty of applicants, but none you actually want to interview.
Then there are the jobs that have been sitting there for weeks while everyone keeps hoping another sponsored advert will somehow find the person you haven’t managed to reach yet.
At that point, you need to stop looking at the number of vacancies and start looking at the recruitment problem behind each one.
- What actually needs filling first?
- What is costing the business money by remaining vacant?
- Where do you know there is candidate demand?
- Where is there a genuine skills shortage?
- Where are the people you need unlikely to apply in the first place?
That’s how I would start deciding what September recruitment looks like.
Not: 50 jobs + £X budget = divide it equally and hope for the best.
I hate to keep banging this drum, but recruitment doesn’t work like that.
More candidates do not automatically mean easier recruitment
The latest ONS vacancy figures estimated 707,000 UK vacancies between May and July 2026. That was down slightly both on the previous quarter and the same period last year. There were also 2.5 unemployed people for every vacancy.
On paper, that could suggest employers have more candidates to choose from.
In reality, more people available for work doesn’t automatically mean more people with the right experience, location, availability, salary expectations or interest in your vacancy.
Candidate availability and candidate suitability are not the same thing.
A campaign can generate more applications and still fail to solve the actual hiring problem. We’ve said it before, but more applications do not necessarily mean better recruitment.
If your team is spending hours screening unsuitable applicants, your cost per application might look wonderful.
Lovely for the spreadsheet. Less helpful for the recruiter slowly losing the will to live.
Don’t forget about your employer brand
If you haven’t dealt with this, why are you still living in 2025?
I’m going to keep talking about employer brand because businesses are still investing thousands of pounds getting candidates to their vacancies and then giving them absolutely no reason to apply.
We’re recruiting in 2026. Candidates research you.
They look at your website. They look at your reviews. They look at your LinkedIn page. They look at what your employees say. Search tools and AI now give them even more ways to understand your business before they get anywhere near an application.
So, what do they find when they search for you?
And does it match the story you’re telling them in the job advert?
Because you can have the best recruitment media strategy in the world, but if a candidate clicks through and sees an outdated careers page, no salary, a generic job description and nothing that tells them why they should work for you, your media isn’t the problem.
More candidates in the market doesn’t just mean more people looking at your jobs. It means more jobs for those candidates to compare you against.
Your employer brand isn’t the fluffy bit you deal with once you’ve sorted the recruitment advertising.
It’s part of the recruitment strategy.
And please don’t just post and pray
The perfect candidate for your vacancy may not be looking for you.
They might be working for your competitor. They might be reasonably happy. They might have thought about moving jobs three months ago and done absolutely nothing about it.
Relatable, to be honest.
That doesn’t make them unavailable. It makes them passive.
This is where you need to stop treating advertising and sourcing as an either/or decision.
Advertising gets you in front of people who are looking. Sourcing gets you in front of the people you need.
LinkedIn Recruiter, Indeed Smart Sourcing, traditional CV databases, your existing talent pool, referrals, direct approaches and newer AI sourcing tools can all have a role here.
And technology is moving quickly. LinkedIn, for example, is continuing to develop Hiring Assistant to help recruiters build sourcing strategies, identify potential candidates and support outreach.
Interesting? Absolutely.
A replacement for recruitment strategy? No.
AI can help you find the candidate. It still can’t explain why they should leave a perfectly acceptable job to come and work for you.
Before you get excited about another piece of technology, somebody still needs to answer:
- Who are you trying to recruit?
- Where are they?
- Why would they move?
- What’s going to make them talk to you?
That’s recruitment. The technology just helps you do it.
September doesn’t mean throwing more money at it
If September is important, the instinct can be to increase budgets.
Sometimes that’s absolutely the right decision. Often it isn’t.
If you’re already attracting enough suitable candidates for a vacancy, adding more budget is just paying to make the recruiter’s inbox louder.
I’d rather put that investment against the role that has been vacant for six weeks, is costing the business in overtime or agency spend and still isn’t producing a shortlist.
Or perhaps you don’t spend it on advertising at all.
Maybe you invest in sourcing.
Maybe you fix the careers page.
Maybe you improve the advert.
Maybe you look at where candidates are dropping out of the application process.
Maybe you discover the salary simply isn’t competitive.
More recruitment activity does not always require more recruitment spend.
Sometimes you need to make better decisions with the spend you’ve already got and make your recruitment media budget work harder.
So, what should you do this September?
Use the reset properly.
Look at what you need to achieve between now and the end of the year, and into 2027. Separate the vacancies that are filling from the ones that are hurting the business.
Look beyond application volume and ask whether your activity is producing suitable candidates, interviews and hires.
Then decide what each recruitment problem actually needs.
That might be more advertising. It might be a different campaign structure, proactive sourcing, a stronger job advert or a better candidate proposition. It might mean removing friction from the application journey.
And yes, sometimes it will mean spending more.
But the budget should follow the recruitment problem, not the other way around.
September brings opportunity. The employers who benefit from it won’t necessarily be the ones advertising the most jobs or spending the most money.
They’ll be the ones making the best decisions about where their attention and investment can genuinely change the outcome.
