The BBC reported today that UK job vacancies have fallen to their lowest level in more than five years, with around 707,000 vacancies currently available.

For many of the jobseekers I speak to every day, that probably won't come as much of a surprise.

I'm regularly speaking with people who tell me they are applying for significantly more jobs than they would have done a couple of years ago.

People with good experience who have rarely struggled to find their next position are finding that they are submitting applications and hearing nothing back.

Others are getting through several stages of an interview process only for recruitment to be paused or the vacancy withdrawn altogether.

There is unquestionably more competition for jobs.

But there is another side to the story.

Surely recruitment should be easier for employers?

If there are fewer vacancies and more people looking for work, you would reasonably expect employers to have an abundance of candidates to choose from.

And in terms of application numbers, many probably do.

Advertise a vacancy today and you may receive 50, 100 or even several hundred applications.

But there is an important distinction.

Candidate availability and skills availability are two very different things.

This is something we see regularly recruiting across the chemical, scientific, pharmaceutical, environmental and industrial sectors.

An employer might receive 100 applications for a laboratory position.

But how many have actually used GC in a commercial laboratory?

How many have the particular pharmaceutical GMP experience required?

How many have worked with hazardous waste and understand waste classification and acceptance?

How many chemical process operators have experience working on the type of plant the employer operates?

How many EC&I Engineers have worked within COMAH or similarly highly regulated manufacturing environments?

How many Energy from Waste candidates have genuinely operated boilers, steam turbines and combustion plant?

Depending on the vacancy, sometimes the answer is only a handful.

Sometimes it is none.

Application volume can be misleading

A weaker employment market can create the impression that recruitment has suddenly become easy.

There are more active candidates.

People are more willing to consider opportunities.

Some candidates may be more flexible around salary, location or seniority than they would have been previously.

Those things absolutely help.

But receiving more applications doesn't necessarily mean receiving more suitable applications.

For specialist positions, the pool of people who can genuinely perform the role may be almost exactly the same size as it was before.

In some areas, it is still extremely small.

The challenge for employers therefore changes.

Rather than simply generating applicants, the challenge becomes identifying the small number of people who have the right experience amongst a much larger volume of applications.

And often the strongest candidate isn't applying at all.

They may be working for a competitor a few miles down the road.

They may be reasonably happy where they are but open to a conversation.

They may have looked at the advert but decided the salary wasn't clear enough.

They may not recognise that their experience is transferable.

Or they may simply never see the vacancy.

There are two sides to the current jobs market

For candidates, this is undoubtedly a more difficult market than we have seen for some time.

If you're applying for positions and receiving fewer responses than you expected, you're certainly not alone. It is a conversation I'm having with jobseekers regularly.

For employers, however, the opposite assumption can be equally problematic.

A difficult candidate market does not automatically create an easy recruitment market.

If you're recruiting relatively general skills, you may have a much greater choice of people than you did previously.

If you're looking for very specific technical experience, you might not.

That is particularly true across many of the sectors we recruit into.

Chemical manufacturing.

Hazardous waste.

Scientific laboratories.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Engineering.

Energy from Waste.

Specialist technical skills remain specialist technical skills, regardless of what is happening to the overall unemployment or vacancy figures.

More candidates does not always mean more choice

The Office of National Statistics figures are an important indication of where the UK employment market currently stands.

There are fewer vacancies.

There are more people competing for those opportunities.

And employers are understandably being more cautious about recruitment.

But when it comes to specialist recruitment, the headline numbers don't always tell the full story.

You can have significantly more people available while still having exactly the same shortage of a particular skill.

Candidate availability and skills availability are not the same thing.

And for many specialist employers, finding the right person remains considerably harder than simply finding someone who is looking for work.

Source: BBC News, 18 August 2026, reporting the latest UK labour market figures.