GAINING MOMENTUM

Sharp Consultancy's Salary Survey 2025/26: Resetting the Landscape: Strategic Shifts in Finance Recruitment

It would be remiss not to start by addressing the elephant in the room — 2024 was a challenging year.While there were many reasons for this and numerous industries were affected, recruitment likely bore the brunt of it, particularly in the 6 months post-election(s).Whilst key roles and critical hires remained unaffected, certain head counts and processes were scrutinised and investment paused with internal restructures and automation utilised to reduce costs, in some instances, at the expense of employees. We subsequently saw an increase in candidate activity, with the talent pool strengthening. As those pressures eased in Quarter 4, recruitment processes saw improvement and green shoots have emerged. Optimism is on the rise in key hiring processes, albeit with a caveat. The cloud of additional cost increases in April, which is still dissipating. The senior finance and C-Suite market remains relatively unaffected, both regarding opportunities and candidates, it is the levels below that we have seen more change. In the evolving landscape of working dynamics, the volume of hybrid working is gradually waning despite sustained interest from candidates, presenting fewer job opportunities. While the blend of office and remote work remains desirable, it is no longer the predominant factor, indicating a notable shift in priorities for clients and candidates’ acceptance alike. Conversations with candidates underscore a growing desire around the importance of having a supportive mentor or manager and many professionals are increasingly open to a full-time return to the office if it guarantees enhanced guidance and avenues for professional advancement. "The salaries throughout transactional finance have stabilised across the region."Throughout the professional practice market, some similar trends have been observed but there have been noticeable differences in the past year. Salaries across the range of candidates in professional practice, from AAT to fully Qualified (ACA/ACCA) individuals are still rising and those firm’s able to offer competitive salaries alongside stronger training contracts are beating out the competition in a candidate market with a growing focus on study support packages and career advancement opportunities for Part-Qualified candidates, indicating an increase in demand from employers and the volume of available job seekers. The salaries throughout transactional finance have stabilised across the region, in what feels like the longest period of stability seen since Q4 2020 and we expect transactional finance salaries to remain stable throughout 2025/26, with anticipated salary increments to be moderate compared to the significant increases observed throughout the last 2 years. AI & Systems (process automation) continues to impact accountancy and finance, in particular, across larger functions but this has increased the need for wider interim support to assist with the transition and implementation especially with large, automated processes. Whilst 2025-26 will not be the same marketplace for recruitment as seen in previous years, there is certainly a growing level of optimism and whilst a more settled market may be seen as a negative in some areas, for those that have weathered the peaks and troughs over a longer period of time, it will feel very normal and a strong setting for both employees and employers to take advantage and thrive, with an increasing emphasis on growth and development.Download the full Salary Survey here!

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This year, for most of us – whether by choice or through circumstances – we have been afforded a little bit more ‘me’ time. I’ve recently taken the opportunity to read, or rather re-read (actually its possibly re-re-read), a book which looked at why some people are able to achieve more in comparison to their peers and many of the points being examined resonated as much, if not more, with me this time around as I applied the author’s thinking to what I see every day working in recruitment. We probably all remember being a child and hearing the story about the hare and the tortoise? It’s a familiar tale; the super confident hare sets off at such a pace that he feels he can afford forty winks and still beat the cumbersomely slow tortoise to win the race. The outcome – which has no doubt been repeated by parents time and time again – is that it is the tortoise who in fact claims victory and the moral of the story is that ‘slow and steady wins the race’.

We tend to focus on how it is the hare’s 'sure-of-himself attitude' that causes his comeuppance, but, just for a minute, let’s consider what it was about the tortoise’s approach which resulted in him gaining success and how that can play out when we apply that to achieving our own career ambitions.

What we are seeing is momentum. Rather than charging off at a break-neck speed which cannot be sustained for the duration of the race, the tortoise adopts a much more manageable pace which he is able to maintain for far longer. And the real undoing of the hare was that after stopping, he found that it was much, much harder to get going again.

How does that translate into the work place? It’s quite simple really. Essentially, it comes down to doing most – if not all – of the right things for most of the time. Being consistent, getting better results for putting in small amounts of effort into tasks over a sustained period of time as opposed to having to make a huge effort to get something done in a shorter time frame.

I thought about this some more in the context of candidates that I’d interviewed and placed over the years; what sets those that had gone on to achieve arguably greater successes in their career over a longer period of time apart from those that perhaps hadn’t quite fulfilled the early promise they had shown was this idea of momentum. There will always be the few exceptions, but for the most part, you could see how those that had climbed the career ladder at a steady and consistent pace – a more manageable pace - over the course of a number of years were achieving ‘more’ than many who, in the early stages of their career, had burst onto the scene with a bang but had been unable to maintain the same trajectory.

After initially showing great potential, what were they doing – or not doing – that was holding them back? I kept coming back to this idea of momentum and how it is somehow easier to keep something going once it has been started – when it has become a habit - and how it’s harder, or more time consuming, to have to go back to tasks we’ve let slip but ultimately still need to be done. And these are often uninspiring, yet no less important, everyday tasks. For example, think back to when we had paper copies of everything and documents needed to be filed. It was a far less onerous task for those people who took a few minutes to diligently file everything away at the end of each day, rather than leave it to pile up until the end of the week (or month).

If we consider again the moral of the hare and the tortoise story – slow and steady wins the race – and understand that what we are really aiming for is ‘steady’ then we see that whilst the drive and confidence in one’s own abilities as displayed by the hare will undoubtedly serve you well, it’s the tortoise-like qualities - reliable, diligent, methodical, dependable – that are absolutely fundamental to achieving longer term career success.

Sharp Consultancy specialises in the recruitment and executive search of finance and accountancy professionals. With offices in Leeds and Sheffield our highly experienced team of consultants recruit for temporary, interim and permanent roles across the full spectrum of positions throughout Yorkshire and beyond. CONTACT UStoday and speak to a member of our team about your recruitment needs or next career move.