Every year, around this time, I have the same conversation with manufacturing businesses.
“We’re thinking about recruiting, but we’ll probably leave it until January.”
And every year, I wonder why.
We’re into autumn, Christmas is approaching, the weather can’t decide whether I need a T-shirt, hoodie or winter coat, and businesses are starting to think about what next year might bring.
Some are waiting for more economic certainty. Others are finalising budgets. A few already know they’ve got vacancies to fill but have decided they’ll worry about them in the new year.
And I understand the thinking.
A fresh year. A fresh budget. A fresh start.
Lovely.
Unfortunately, January isn’t some magical recruitment utopia.
In fact, from my experience, it can be one of the most frustrating times of the year to start looking for somebody.
The January recruitment traffic jam
I’ve been recruiting since 2005, and I can count on one finger the number of Januaries I remember being particularly brilliant.
2008, if you’re interested.
The problem isn’t that January is necessarily a bad time to recruit. It’s that everybody seems to arrive at the same decision simultaneously.
You’ve got businesses that deliberately postponed their recruitment until after Christmas.
You’ve got companies dealing with resignations handed in before the holidays.
You’ve got people announcing retirement plans, businesses launching new projects and hiring managers discovering that the additional headcount they’ve been promised actually needs to materialise.
And then you’ve got the candidates.
The new-year-new-me brigade, the people who have spent Christmas thinking about changing careers, those testing their market value, and the occasional absolute gem who’s suddenly decided it’s time to move.
On the surface, that sounds wonderful.
More vacancies. More applicants. More activity.
But there’s a catch.
More recruitment activity doesn’t automatically mean more suitable engineers are available.
And when several manufacturing businesses start looking for the same type of person at the same time, they can find themselves chasing a surprisingly small group of candidates.
The candidate you want isn’t necessarily looking
Imagine you’re recruiting an experienced Mechanical Design Engineer.
You want somebody who understands your products, can work independently, has good manufacturing knowledge and ideally knows your particular CAD package.
That’s already a fairly specific person.
Now imagine three other manufacturers in your area are recruiting similar people.
They’re all advertising. They’re all approaching candidates. They’re all offering roughly comparable salaries.
And they’re all hoping the right person will appear.
The difficulty is that the person you really want might be perfectly happy in their current job.
They’re not applying to adverts. They’re not spending their evenings looking through job boards. They might not even have updated their CV for five years.
Finding and engaging with those people takes time.
And that’s before you’ve convinced them that your opportunity is worth considering.
Which is why I think businesses need to stop confusing the date they start recruiting with the date somebody will actually start working for them.
Those are two very different things.
Starting in January doesn’t mean hiring in January
Let’s work through a fairly ordinary scenario.
You decide to start recruiting on the first working Monday in January.
First, the job specification needs agreeing. Perhaps HR needs to approve it, the hiring manager wants to make a few adjustments, and there’s a discussion about whether the salary is competitive.
Then the vacancy is advertised.
Applications arrive. Some are relevant, plenty aren’t.
You arrange interviews.
One candidate withdraws. Another can’t attend for two weeks because they’re away on business. The hiring manager is unavailable on the only afternoon your preferred candidate can make.
Eventually, you identify somebody worth employing.
Excellent.
Except they’ve got a three-month notice period.
Suddenly, your January recruitment exercise has become an April or May start date.
And that’s assuming you’ve found the right person relatively quickly.
For difficult-to-fill engineering roles, the search itself can take considerably longer.
I’ve worked on vacancies where businesses have already spent six months searching before approaching me.
Six months, and not a single sausage of the right candidate.
Now, I’m not suggesting every engineering vacancy takes six months to fill. Plenty don’t.
But if the position is important enough to your business, surely it deserves something more than hoping the right person appears in January?
Why autumn can be a better time to begin
There’s a distinction worth making here.
Starting your recruitment process doesn’t necessarily mean appointing somebody immediately.
You can begin reviewing your requirements now.
You can establish what experience is essential, what can be taught, and what salary the market is likely to demand.
You can investigate how many suitable candidates actually exist within a reasonable travelling distance.
And you can start conversations with people who might be interested in joining you in the new year.
Some candidates will be happy to move before Christmas.
Others might prefer to wait until January, particularly if they’ve got commitments they want to finish with their current employer.
That’s fine.
The important thing is that you’re having those conversations before everybody else has decided to start looking.
You’re giving yourself options.
And in recruitment, having options is a rather useful position to be in.
What if you haven’t got the budget approved?
This is an objection I hear regularly, and it’s a fair one.
You might know you’ll need an additional engineer next year, but you can’t formally authorise the appointment until the new budget is agreed.
That doesn’t necessarily prevent you from preparing.
You can review the job description, benchmark salaries, assess the likely candidate pool and establish what a realistic recruitment timeline looks like.
You can also challenge whether you’re asking for the right person.
Perhaps you’ve got a specification that combines three different engineering jobs into one.
Perhaps the salary hasn’t moved for several years.
Perhaps the experience you believe is essential is actually something an otherwise capable engineer could learn within a few months.
Finding these things out before you start recruiting is considerably easier than discovering them after you’ve spent three months advertising an impossible vacancy.
There is, of course, a sensible boundary. Don’t make promises to candidates about jobs or start dates that haven’t been approved.
But preparation and a formal hiring commitment aren’t the same thing.
Recruitment needs to follow the business, not the calendar
Ultimately, that’s the point I’m trying to make.
If your business needs an Engineer, Engineering Manager or Technical Sales professional to support growth next year, the question shouldn’t simply be when you’d like to start recruiting.
It should be when you actually need that person contributing to the business.
Work backwards from there.
Allow time to find somebody suitable, arrange interviews, negotiate an offer and accommodate their notice period.
And remember that the most experienced people aren’t necessarily sitting around waiting for your advert to appear.
January might still be the right time for your business to begin recruiting.
But it should be a deliberate decision, rather than something you’ve chosen because Christmas is approaching and everyone would rather deal with it next year.
If you want somebody in place early in 2027, the time to start thinking seriously about recruitment is now.
Not when everybody else has had exactly the same idea.
Thomas Lee Recruitment specialises in Engineering, Manufacturing and Technical Sales recruitment for UK businesses, particularly SMEs looking for specialist technical skills.
If you’re planning next year’s recruitment, explore our permanent recruitment services or read more about the cost of leaving an engineering vacancy unfilled.