Can You Still Hire Someone Before Christmas?

September has a habit of making the end of the year feel a long way away.

There are still plenty of weeks left, Christmas feels like somebody else's problem and there seems to be loads of time to sort out that vacancy you've been meaning to fill.

Except, when it comes to recruitment, there probably isn't quite as much time as you think.

If you want someone to start before Christmas, they need to be found, interviewed, offered the job, accepted, and then released by their current employer. There may also be references, internal approvals, second interviews and the small matter of getting several busy diaries to agree on a date.

Suddenly, that apparently roomy final quarter starts looking rather less roomy.

And this is often where recruitment plans come unstuck. Not necessarily because there aren't good people available, but because the calendar quietly gets in the way.

There has been plenty of talk about a quieter recruitment market this year, and the number of UK vacancies has fallen compared with the previous year. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics put the number of vacancies at 707,000 between May and July 2026.

That doesn't mean employers have stopped recruiting, though. Far from it.

There are still people looking, people considering a move and people who would be open to the right opportunity if it happened to land in front of them.

What has changed is that employers can be more cautious about making decisions, while good candidates are often having conversations with more than one organisation at a time.

That makes the final few months of the year slightly more interesting.

If you know you need somebody, leaving the process sitting on the to-do list for another few weeks doesn't necessarily make life easier. It simply leaves you with fewer weeks to do everything that needs to happen.

One of the easiest ways to work out whether a December start is realistic is to stop looking at today's date and work backwards from when you actually want someone to start.

Let's say you would ideally like someone in place on 1 December.

If they have a month's notice to work, you're already looking at an offer being accepted around the end of October. If they have a three-month notice period, the maths gets considerably less friendly.

And that's before you've allowed time for interviews, references, salary discussions, internal approvals and the inevitable bit where three people are all available on completely different days.

Then you need to find the people in the first place.

By the time you work backwards through the whole process, you may find that the real deadline for getting started is September rather than November.

This is why recruitment can be a little deceptive at this time of year. Looking forwards, there appears to be plenty of time. Looking backwards from the date you actually need somebody, it can look very different.

You can speed a recruitment process up, of course, but it is much easier to build a sensible process from the beginning than to try to recover three lost weeks halfway through it.

Usually, it isn't one enormous delay that causes a vacancy to drift into the new year.

It's lots of perfectly ordinary little delays.

A CV sits in someone's inbox for a few days because they're busy. Then it takes another few days to agree who should be interviewed. The first interviews happen, but everyone is struggling to find time for the second ones.

Someone goes on holiday.

Someone else has a meeting they can't move.

The person who needs to approve the salary is unavailable.

Before you know it, a process that looked perfectly manageable in September is suddenly being discussed in terms of a January start.

The ONS reported that 20% of UK private-sector businesses with ten or more employees were experiencing recruitment difficulties in January 2026. That is a useful reminder that finding the right person isn't always simply a case of putting an advert online and waiting for applications to arrive.

Sometimes the problem isn't the number of people applying. It's finding the person who actually fits what you need.

And if that person is already talking to other employers, you don't necessarily have the luxury of taking your time.

One of the things that can slow recruitment down considerably is trying to find someone who ticks every possible box.

We all know how it happens:

You start with a sensible list of requirements and, as the process develops, a few more things get added. Then somebody decides that another skill would be useful, and somebody else remembers that the person really ought to have experience of something else too.

Before long, you're looking for a mythical candidate who can do absolutely everything, has exactly the right background and would ideally be available tomorrow.

It is worth deciding at the beginning what the person genuinely needs to be able to do:

What are the three or four things that really matter?

What could they learn?

What would make you say, "Yes, this is the person we want"?

Having that conversation before the first CV arrives can save a surprising amount of time later, particularly when more than one person is involved in the decision.

It also makes it much easier to keep everyone focused on the same thing rather than having a slightly different version of the ideal candidate developing in every interviewer's head.

Another simple one, but one that can cause an amazing amount of faffing about, is knowing who actually has the final say. If somebody appears halfway through the process with a completely different opinion, you're back to square one.

Decide who needs to be involved before you start, make sure they know what the role is looking for and, importantly, work out what happens if they are away.

The same applies to the salary. There is very little point finding someone who is right for the role, getting them excited about the opportunity and then discovering that the salary hasn't been agreed or that the budget doesn't stretch to the offer you need to make.

Those conversations are much easier to have at the beginning than when you've got a candidate waiting for an answer.

Autumn diaries have a habit of filling up.

There are holidays that weren't taken over the summer, school half-term, meetings, year-end planning and all the other things that suddenly seem to become urgent when October arrives.

Interviews are often one of the first things to get moved when something else crops up.

The problem is that the candidate doesn't necessarily see it in the same way.

You might know that everyone is ridiculously busy and that moving an interview by a week isn't the end of the world. The candidate simply knows that they were supposed to have an interview and now they don't.

And if they're having conversations with other employers, they aren't necessarily going to sit patiently waiting for your diary to clear.

One of the simplest things you can do is protect some interview time before you actually need it. If the vacancy is important enough to fill this year, it is worth giving the process some space in the diary. It also helps to know who can step in if the usual hiring manager suddenly finds themselves unavailable.

There will be vacancies that simply aren't going to be filled before Christmas, and there is no great prize for pretending otherwise. 

If January is the more realistic start date, that is fine.

What matters is deciding that now rather than reaching December, closing the recruitment process for Christmas and starting again from a completely blank page in January.

If you already have good candidates in the process, be honest with them about the timescale. People can cope with a January start. What tends to cause problems is silence and uncertainty.

You can also think about whether temporary, contract or interim support is needed to keep things moving while you recruit permanently.

The important thing is to have a plan - January will arrive whether you're ready for it or not.

This is probably the biggest thing to take away from all of this.

September, October and November might look like a fairly generous amount of time, but once you take notice periods, interviews, decision-making, holidays and the Christmas break into account, the actual recruitment window is much smaller.

So, if you have vacancies open now, it is worth asking a fairly simple question:

Does this person genuinely need to start before Christmas?

If the answer is yes, work backwards from the date and see what needs to happen between now and then.

If the answer is no, decide when you realistically want the person to start and plan accordingly.

And if you aren't sure whether the timing is realistic, talk it through with someone who knows the market and can give you an honest view of what is achievable. Sometimes a vacancy needs a push. Sometimes it needs a little more time. And occasionally, it needs somebody to point out that you've spent three weeks discussing the job description when you could have been talking to candidates.

The important thing is knowing which situation you're actually in.

If you've got vacancies you'd like to fill before the end of the year, now is a good time to look at the whole process rather than simply putting another advert out and hoping for the best.

Because December has a rather annoying habit of arriving much sooner than expected.