More UK employers are advertising tech roles themselves

CV-Library and APSCo looked at UK tech job adverts between April and June. Employers advertising directly were up 19.8% on the year before. Agency adverts were down 19.4%. On those figures, roughly seven in ten tech adverts now come straight from the employer.

Adverts are not the same thing as hires. The exact percentages will move. The direction is clear enough to take seriously: more companies are running the advert themselves.

For a lot of roles, that is a sound choice. A firm with a known name, a working internal recruitment team, and a role that is straightforward to fill can post the job on its own site and on the boards. Paying an agency to place the same advert adds cost and a layer of delay. Volume hiring, and many professional roles below the executive team, often belong in-house.

Where the advert stops being the job

The mistake is to treat every vacancy as that kind of vacancy. Filling a seat, and finding the right person for a role that will shape the technology, the team and the spending for years, are different pieces of work. The second one does not become easier because the advert went up faster.

The people best suited to a Chief AI Officer, CTO, CIO or Chief Data Officer post are almost always employed. They are rarely reading adverts. They consider a role when someone who understands it approaches them directly, with a brief that is specific about the reporting line, the team, the salary and the difficulties. An advert can announce that a company is hiring. It does not hold the confidential conversation, and it does not manage the notice period, the counter-offer, or the week in which a senior acceptance falls through.

Clario’s work sits in that second job. The firm agrees the brief in writing, approaches people who are already in senior roles, and stays through the offer. Terms are agreed before the search starts. That is a different service from posting a vacancy.

What in-house teams are right to keep

Internal teams are closer to the hiring manager, they know the unwritten rules, and they can move quickly on roles the market understands. A Head of Engineering under a strong CTO, a replacement for a known job, or several hires at once, are often better owned inside.

The handoff is worth writing down. If the internal team has already tried, and the shortlist was thin because the title and the job did not match, another advert will repeat the miss. That is the moment to stop and redefine the role. Sometimes the right next step is a Head of AI reporting to the CTO, or a Head of Data before any AI leader. Sometimes it is a Chief AI Officer with a real remit. The pages on those roles set out the difference. The salary ranges published by Hays, Harvey Nash and others are collected on the salary guide, so a brief can start with a sourced number rather than a guess.

How to read the 19.8%

The CV-Library and APSCo comparison is about adverts in a single quarter, set against the year before. It says more employers are willing to speak for themselves in the tech market, and that agency volume at the advert level has fallen. It does not say that senior searches have become simple, and it does not say that every in-house team wants to take on a confidential chief officer hire.

Boards that have moved more of their tech hiring inside this year can keep what is working. The question to settle role by role is whether the person you need is likely to apply. If they are, advertise, and run a short, serious process. If they are not, the work is a search: a written brief, a direct approach, and a shortlist with a candid view of each person.

The figures in this note come from CV-Library and APSCo’s look at UK tech job adverts between April and June. They are cited as market research. They are not a Clario placement statistic.