What the UK National Hiring Strategy Really Means for Hiring Leaders

In 2025, the Better Hiring Institute (BHI) did something the UK had never done before. It pulled together employers, policymakers and hiring experts to write a National Hiring Strategy for the country.

The starting point is blunt. In BHI’s own words, hiring in Britain is “broken”, and the cost of that dysfunction is estimated at £75 billion a year. The ambition of the Strategy is to cut that cost in half and to make UK hiring faster, fairer and safer in the process.

This is not just another whitepaper. It is a public strategy, launched in Parliament and backed by an employer network that now involves more than a thousand organisations.

This article explains what is inside the National Hiring Strategy, how credible it is, why it matters, and how its direction of travel connects with the way Maki thinks about hiring. The goal is clarity, not hype, so you can confidently reference the Strategy in your own conversations.

You can read the original materials here:
The National Hiring Strategy – Better Hiring Institute.

What is the UK National Hiring Strategy?

The National Hiring Strategy is an initiative led by the Better Hiring Institute, a non profit social enterprise that works closely with UK policymakers on modernising recruitment. BHI runs the Modernising Employment All Party Parliamentary Group in Westminster and has already influenced concrete changes, from digital right to work reform to early guidance on AI in hiring.

Within that broader agenda, the Strategy is positioned as:

• The UK’s first national, cross sector blueprint for how hiring should work
• A “living” strategy that will evolve as new evidence and technologies emerge
• A framework designed to shape standards in both public and private sectors, not just one industry

The official BHI page describes how hiring has “evolved without any real direction or overarching strategy”, leaving the UK with a fractured recruitment marketplace that is slow for employers, frustrating for candidates and vulnerable to fraud.

The National Hiring Strategy is an attempt to replace that accidental system with a deliberate, modern one.

Crucially, it is not law. There is no section of the Employment Rights Act that forces employers to comply. It sits in the space where policy, best practice and commercial pressure meet. For HR and talent leaders, that is often where expectations shift first, long before regulation catches up.

How broken is hiring in the UK?

Anyone who works in talent acquisition knows hiring is hard. The Strategy puts hard numbers on why.

On its launch page, BHI estimates that broken hiring costs the UK economy £75 billion per year, taking into account productivity loss, vacancy drag, mis hiring and early churn. The Strategy sets a target to cut that figure by half, a potential £37.5 billion gain if the country can move to a better model.

Independent reporting backs up the scale of the problem. The Global Recruiter describes how average time to hire in the UK now sits at almost 50 days, longer in sectors like healthcare, and how around 40 percent of people quit their new job within three months.

Behind those numbers sit very human issues:

• Processes that run for weeks or months before a decision
• Candidates who apply to dozens of roles and rarely hear back
• Teams juggling manual checks, inconsistent interviews and rising fraud risks

The Strategy starts by acknowledging this reality. Then it poses a simple question: if Britain could design hiring from scratch today, in a digital and AI enabled labour market, what should it look like?

The big shifts the Strategy is calling for

The full PDF covers a lot of ground. From an employer perspective, four shifts matter most.

1. From CV led hiring to skills led hiring

Throughout BHI’s materials there is a consistent message. The traditional CV and reference based model is no longer fit for purpose. At the launch of the UK Hiring Taskforce in Parliament, BHI’s chair talked about “medieval CVs” and “Victorian references”, and asked what hiring would look like if we started again.

The Strategy points toward a different foundation:

• Roles defined in terms of skills, competencies and outcomes, not just degrees and job titles
• Use of structured assessments and simulations to measure those skills in a fair, consistent way
• Decisions based on evidence that predicts performance, rather than only narrative CVs and unstructured interviews

This aligns with the wider “skills first” movement in HR. The difference here is that BHI is attempting to codify skills first hiring as a national norm, not a niche experiment.

2. Faster, simpler and more inclusive journeys

A second theme is speed and accessibility.

In its 10 Point Action Plans for better hiring, BHI argues that UK recruitment is overburdened with legacy rules and manual steps, and that a focused modernisation could cut hiring durations significantly while bringing many more people back into work.

The Strategy and related campaigns push employers to:

• Strip out unnecessary stages and repeated data entry
• Design processes that are accessible to disabled and neurodivergent candidates and to people from minority and faith backgrounds
• Communicate more clearly, so candidates are not left guessing where they stand

The vision is that hiring should feel like a modern digital service, not a paper form that happens to live online.

3. Digital identity, verification and credentials

BHI has been a leading voice in UK discussions on digital identity for work, advising on how to modernise right to work checks and reduce hiring fraud.

In the context of the National Hiring Strategy, that translates into a push for:

• Wider use of digital identity schemes for right to work and criminal record checks
• Greater reliance on digital credentials for qualifications and training
• Standardised document validation, so employers apply consistent checks at the right stages

The direction is clear. Over time, UK employers will be expected to move away from ad hoc photocopies and disparate spreadsheets toward interoperable digital proofs of identity and skill.

4. AI that is transparent and human guided

The final major theme is AI.

The Strategy does not pretend AI is going away. It recognises that AI is already embedded in sourcing, matching and screening, and that it can either entrench bias or help reduce it. BHI has co authored guidance on AI in hiring with Lord Holmes and others, some of which has fed into the UK’s emerging AI regulation.

The expectations flowing into the Strategy are straightforward:

• AI should support recruiters and managers, not silently make final decisions in their place
• Employers should be able to explain how automated recommendations are generated
• Processes should be monitored for bias and adverse impact, with data to back up claims of fairness

The Strategy is friendly to responsible, auditable AI, and deeply wary of black box automation that no one can defend in front of a regulator or a candidate.

Is the National Hiring Strategy a mandate?

For many leaders, the key question is whether the Strategy is something they are required to “comply with”.

Right now, it is not.

The National Hiring Strategy is created and led by the Better Hiring Institute rather than a government department. It is supported and debated in Parliament, and sits alongside other BHI campaigns that influence legislation and guidance, but it has not been passed as a statutory code or Act.

That means:

• There is no dedicated regulator enforcing it today
• You will not be fined simply because your process does not match every recommendation
• You will, however, look increasingly out of step if you ignore it completely

The pragmatic way to view it is as strong policy direction. It shows how future “good hiring” is likely to be defined in the UK. That is useful whether you are a CHRO defending investment in hiring transformation or a TA leader making the case for new tools and processes.

What employers should do next

You do not need a thousand page transformation plan. You do need a clear story about where you stand and where you are going relative to the Strategy.

A practical starting point:

Check your speed. Measure time to hire from vacancy approval to accepted offer in your critical roles. If you are far slower than peers, the Strategy gives you external backing to push for simplification and better candidate communication.

Look for CV dependence. Walk through your flows and mark every decision that leans purely on CVs and unstructured interviews. Then ask where you could replace that with structured assessments, work samples or more consistent interviewing.

Modernise checks and credentials. Map how you handle right to work, background checks and qualification verification. If it is mostly manual and inconsistent by business unit, BHI’s digital identity work is a clear signal that this will soon be seen as a risk, not a neutral choice.

Put a frame around AI. If you already use AI for sourcing or screening, be ready to explain where it is used, who remains accountable, how you test for bias, and how you would explain a specific decision to a candidate or regulator.

The Strategy gives you a public reference when you make each of these moves.

How Maki’s philosophy connects to the Strategy

Maki exists to give HR teams more than human powers through AI agents that help them hire, manage and develop people in better ways. That mission sits naturally beside the themes of the National Hiring Strategy, even though the Strategy itself is vendor neutral.

The overlap is mostly about principles:

• Skills first, not CV first. Maki is built around structured assessments, simulations and evidence based scoring, which is exactly the skills led model the Strategy promotes.
• Faster without cutting corners. Maki’s agents automate repetitive steps like scheduling and follow ups, so hiring can move faster while humans still make the judgment calls.
• Transparent and fair AI. Maki’s approach is to keep scoring auditable and to give HR teams insight into how recommendations are produced, so they can monitor for bias instead of trusting a black box.
• Structured data for a digital future. By turning assessment results into consistent skills profiles, employers are better placed for a world of digital credentials and interoperable hiring data.

You can apply these principles with or without Maki. The point is not that “using Maki equals compliance”. The point is that if you are moving in these directions, you are walking in step with the national conversation the Strategy is trying to lead.

If you want, I can now compress this into a short Webflow friendly summary for the hero section plus an internal link block you can reuse across other policy or regulation related posts.

‍

‍