September traditionally brings renewed momentum to the recruitment market. Summer holidays are over, budgets are being revisited and appointments that may have been discussed for several months begin to move forward.
But before retrieving the old job description and taking another vacancy to market, there is a question I think organisations increasingly need to ask:
Are we recruiting for the job the business needs now, or simply replacing the person who previously occupied it?
It sounds like a relatively straightforward distinction, but it is becoming increasingly important.
Organisations are introducing AI, automating processes, restructuring teams and asking employees to operate across broader remits. At the same time, the capabilities businesses value are changing. Analytical thinking, judgement, adaptability, commercial understanding and the ability to work effectively with technology are becoming more important across roles that may previously have been defined very differently.
Yet when somebody resigns, the instinctive response is often still to retrieve their job description, make a few amendments and start looking for somebody with broadly the same background.
There is a growing risk that the job has changed more quickly than the job description and the scale of change taking place within the labour market is becoming increasingly visible.
PwC’s 2026 UK AI Jobs Barometer, which forms part of an analysis of more than one billion job advertisements globally, found that UK job postings requiring specialist AI skills increased by 61% in a single year, rising from 112,000 to 180,000.
That increase happened while overall UK vacancies fell by 6.6%.
AI-related roles now account for 2.2% of the UK jobs market, compared with 1.3% a year earlier. Perhaps more interestingly, the majority of the growth is not coming from organisations simply recruiting more AI developers. AI “user” roles, where individuals apply AI within an existing area of professional expertise, increased by almost 66%.
That distinction is important. It suggests that AI is not simply creating a separate category of technology jobs. It is beginning to change the capabilities required within existing professions.
Read PwC’s 2026 UK AI Jobs Barometer
There is another striking number in the PwC research. The average UK wage premium for workers with specialist AI skills has increased to 34.2%, up from 11% the previous year.
Financial Services is among the sectors where AI capabilities are already becoming strategically important, while Technology, Media and Telecoms has the highest concentration of AI-related vacancies.
However, the report also challenges the assumption that AI will simply make human skills less valuable.
PwC found increasing demand for judgement, creativity, leadership and adaptability in occupations most exposed to AI. Its wider analysis found that the skills required within the most AI-exposed jobs are changing more than twice as quickly as those in less exposed occupations.
That has significant implications for recruitment. If the skills required to perform a job are changing quickly, recruiting primarily on the basis that somebody has previously held the same job title becomes increasingly unreliable.
Of course the big questions is, are organisations actually ready for this? The evidence suggests many are not. Research published this year by the CIPD, based on a survey of 1,342 people professionals and business leaders, found that around 45% of organisations remain at an ad hoc or experimental stage of AI adoption.
More significantly, 42% of organisations experimenting with AI fall into the lowest category for organisational readiness. They lack strength across areas such as governance, infrastructure, innovation and workforce transformation planning.
Read the CIPD research on future-proofing skills as AI reshapes work
That creates an interesting challenge for HR. Technology may be changing how work is performed before organisations have properly redesigned the roles of the people performing it. If AI removes 20% of the administration from an HR role, for example, what replaces that work?
Does the individual now need stronger analytical capability? More commercial judgement? Greater responsibility for advising managers? Could responsibilities previously divided between several positions be combined differently? Or could the capacity released by technology allow the individual to spend considerably more time on the strategic and human aspects of their role?
Those are not simply technology questions. They are organisation design, workforce planning and ultimately recruitment questions.
As a result, it then becomes the”Job Description Problem.” Traditional job descriptions have always had limitations, but this changing environment exposes them further.
Many are built around tasks and responsibilities rather than outcomes and capability. When somebody leaves, those tasks are often transferred almost unchanged into the specification for their replacement.
This can result in organisations recruiting backwards. The brief effectively asks: “Who has done what our previous person did?”
Perhaps the more valuable question is: “Who can deliver what our organisation needs next?”
Those two questions can lead to very different candidates.
A business may discover that it needs somebody with stronger transformation experience, greater commercial exposure, better data capability or experience influencing a different type of leadership team.
Equally, it may discover that someone from outside its traditional sector brings highly transferable experience that would otherwise have been screened out because their CV did not look familiar enough.
Which then brings us on to the other key factor which is adaptability is becoming a business requirement.
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research, based on input from around 9,000 leaders across 76 countries, provides another useful perspective.
Seven in ten business leaders say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to become faster and more agile. Yet there is a significant gap between ambition and execution.
Some 85% of leaders believe building the ability of the organisation and workforce to adapt at speed is critical, but only 7% believe they are leading in helping their workforce continuously grow and adapt.
The gap around work design is even more striking. Only 6% of leaders say they are making progress in deliberately designing how humans and AI should interact at work. Meanwhile, 60% of executives are already regularly using AI to support decision making, yet only 5% believe their organisations manage that process particularly well.
Read Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital Trends report
This suggests the technology may be moving considerably faster than the organisational structures surrounding it. For HR leaders, that creates both a challenge and an opportunity.
The People function has an important role to play not simply in implementing new technology, but in helping the business understand how jobs, teams, skills and career paths need to evolve alongside it.
So what does this mean for HR Recruitment? I think this is particularly relevant when recruiting within HR itself.
People functions are increasingly expected to understand data, AI and HR technology while continuing to deliver the things technology cannot easily replicate: judgement, empathy, influence, commercial understanding, leadership and the ability to navigate difficult organisational situations.
A Head of HR appointed five years ago may therefore have been recruited against a very different set of expectations from somebody entering the same position today. The same applies across Reward, Talent Acquisition, Learning & Development, HR Operations and HR Business Partnering.
Technology may automate elements of these roles, but that does not necessarily make the people performing them less important. In many cases, it raises the level at which they are expected to operate.
PwC’s research provides an interesting indication of this. Globally, companies most able to take advantage of AI have actually increased headcount faster than less AI-exposed organisations, 52% compared with 36% against a 2018 baseline.
The story therefore appears more complicated than simply “AI replaces jobs”. It is increasingly about AI changing jobs.
A Grafton Haymes Perspective
Some of the most valuable conversations we have with clients take place before we begin discussing candidates. When somebody leaves an organisation, there is a natural temptation to replace them quickly. But it also creates a rare opportunity to reconsider the position.
What worked particularly well? What was missing? How has the organisation changed? What will the individual need to achieve over the next two or three years? Which capabilities will become more important?
Perhaps most importantly: If we were creating this position from scratch today, would we design the same job?
Those questions often produce a very different recruitment brief.
They can also open up a much broader talent market because the emphasis moves away from finding somebody who looks exactly like the previous incumbent and towards identifying people with the capability to deliver what comes next.
That is where I think recruitment needs to evolve alongside work itself. A CV will tell you where somebody has worked and what title they held.
A good recruitment process needs to establish what they actually achieved, how they think, how they influence, how they adapt and whether they have the capability to succeed in an environment that may look very different three years from now.
The September Question
As organisations return to hiring decisions that may have been sitting on the agenda throughout the summer, perhaps there is one useful question to ask before another vacancy goes to market:
If nobody had ever done this job before, how would we design it today?
In a labour market where technology, skills and organisational structures are evolving quickly, the answer may tell you considerably more about who you should recruit than the old job description ever could.
If you are reviewing an HR role, reshaping your People function or considering an appointment for the remainder of 2026, Grafton Haymes would be very happy to provide an external view of the market.
Sometimes the most valuable part of a recruitment process happens before the search begins.
