What the First Half of 2026 Has Told Me About Hiring

It's the 1st of July, which means we're officially halfway through the year. Half of 2026 is done! Targets set in January are either on track or starting to look like wishful thinking, and most of us are too busy delivering to stop and actually look at what's happened.

So that's what this is. A pause. A look back at the trends I've seen at Tech23 over the last six months, mostly through the lens of the MSP community I spend most of my time working with, and what they might mean for the second half.

Mid to senior IT talent is still in demand. Junior talent isn't...

The clearest pattern this year has been a split in demand by seniority, and it's been especially pronounced among my MSP clients. Mid to high level IT engineers are still very much sought after. Clients want people who can hit the ground running, who understand complex environments, and who don't need months of hand holding to be useful.

What's dropped off is appetite for entry level and junior resource. This isn't a small dip either, it's a sustained shift, and I think it's down to two things happening at once.

First, AI tools are absorbing a lot of the work that used to be the natural training ground for junior engineers. The repetitive, lower complexity tasks that gave juniors their first foothold are increasingly handled by automation, which narrows the entry point into the profession.

Second, more companies are choosing to grow their own talent from scratch rather than hire it in. Taking someone on as a graduate or apprentice and shaping them around the business avoids paying recruitment fees for a non specialised hire, and it means the person grows up technically within that company's tools, processes, and culture rather than arriving with habits from somewhere else.

Neither of these is necessarily a bad thing. But it does mean the junior end of the market looks very different to how it did even two or three years ago.

Candidates aren't sitting around, and they're not waiting on counter-offers either

Within that mid to senior bracket, the pattern that stands out most is around security skills specifically. Compliance pressure on MSPs hasn't let up, and candidates with genuine security credentials, not just exposure, are moving through process faster than almost anyone else on my desk. If you're hiring at this level and your process still takes weeks to get from first interview to offer, you're probably losing good people to someone quicker.

That speed point is really worth thinking about. Time to hire for strong mid and senior candidates has compressed noticeably this year. Strong candidates aren't sitting on the market, and they're not waiting around through a five stage process either. Clients who've adapted, tighter interview loops, faster decision making, clearer offers, are winning the people they actually want. Clients still running last year's process are losing them to someone else.

On the flip side, I'm seeing less counter offer activity than I'd have expected given how tight the senior market is. That tells me something about confidence. People aren't just testing the water to see what their current employer will do to keep them, they're moving because they've already decided to, which usually means they're moving toward something, rather than just away from something. This is worth noting if you're on the hiring side, because it means the conversation with a strong candidate is less about beating a counter offer and more about giving them a genuine reason to choose you.

Marketing has crept onto my desk, and I'm not complaining

This one surprised me a bit. I've never actively targeted marketing as a specialism, but client demand has pulled me into building a network there over the last six months. MSPs are increasingly investing in marketing resource, whether that's someone to own demand generation, content, or campaigns, and they're coming to recruiters they already trust to help them find it.

It's a good reminder that markets don't always move in the direction you plan for. Sometimes you follow what your clients actually need rather than what you set out to specialise in.

The MSP space keeps evolving

MSPs are under more pressure than ever to be flexible. Client expectations are shifting, security requirements keep tightening, and the pace of technology change means the skills needed today aren't always the skills that were needed eighteen months ago. The MSPs handling this well are the ones treating their hiring strategy as something that needs revisiting regularly, not something set once a year and left alone.

Geographically, London and the Home Counties continue to be the most active patch I work in, and competition for senior engineers here is sharper than I've seen it. If you're a Home Counties based MSP competing against London salaries for the same talent pool, it's worth having an honest conversation about what else you can offer beyond pay, because pay alone is rarely winning that fight right now.

AI is changing what a senior MSP hire actually looks like

There's also a knock on effect from AI that goes beyond the junior hiring point I made earlier. If AI is changing how MSPs actually deliver services, automating monitoring, triaging tickets, handling first line response, then it's also changing what the senior end of the team needs to look like. The value increasingly sits with engineers who can design and oversee these systems, not just operate within them. I'd expect the MSPs who get ahead of this, by hiring and developing people who can work alongside automation rather than compete with it, to be in a stronger position by the end of the year than those still hiring against an old job spec.

Contract is having a moment

If there's one structural change worth calling out, it's this. Interest in contract resource, as opposed to permanent hires, has grown noticeably among my MSP clients this year.

It makes sense when you look at what's actually driving demand. Projects, onboardings, migrations, these are often time bound pieces of work with a clear start and end point, and they don't always justify a permanent headcount. Contract resource gives MSPs the flexibility to bring in the right skills exactly when they're needed, scale up for a specific piece of work, and scale back down without the overhead of a permanent hire sitting on the books once the project's finished.

It's proving a cost effective way to meet the urgency I'm seeing from clients, and I expect this to keep growing through the second half of the year.

Three things I think MSPs need to start thinking about

A few things worth flagging now, before they become problems rather than choices.

The first is a succession question nobody's really asking yet. If the junior pipeline keeps thinning, the senior bench three to five years from now thins with it. Today's mid level engineers were yesterday's juniors. If that intake keeps shrinking, MSPs that aren't actively building their own pipeline now, through apprenticeships, structured graduate schemes, or investment in early career talent, may find themselves competing even harder for an even smaller senior pool further down the line. It's not an H2 problem in the sense of urgency, but it is an H2 problem in the sense of timing. The MSPs who start now will be in a different position to the ones who wait until it bites.

The second is what I'd call core and flex as a deliberate strategy rather than a reaction. Right now, most of the contract usage I'm seeing is project led, a migration comes up, a client needs capacity, and contract resource fills the gap. What I expect to develop is MSPs designing their staffing model around this from the outset, a smaller permanent core built for stability and client relationships, with contract capacity planned in as a known, recurring part of how they operate rather than something brought in only when a project lands unannounced. That's a more mature, more deliberate way of using the flexibility contract resource offers.

The third is procurement getting sharper. Cost is no longer the only question MSP clients are asking. As compliance and security expectations rise, I expect MSPs to face more scrutiny on the workforce behind their service delivery, not just the service itself. That has knock-on implications for how MSPs hire and present their teams, particularly around contract resource, where transparency on who's doing the work is becoming as important as the work itself.

So, how's your year actually going?

This is the part I'd really encourage you to sit with for a minute. Forget the noise and ask yourself honestly, are you ahead of your targets at the halfway point, or behind them?

If you're ahead, what's worked, and are you doing enough of it to keep that momentum into H2?

If you're behind, what needs to change before December rolls around? Is it your hiring strategy, your resourcing model, your team structure, or something else?

Six months is enough time to course correct. It's not enough time to waste.