The numbers have changed People starting new jobs in the UK are at their lowest level in five years. Vacancies keep falling. The Bank of England is holding interest rates steady because nobody knows what happens next with the Middle East situation. Tesco's sales growth has halved. This is the backdrop. If you run a small business or lead a small team, you feel this already. The question is not whether the market has shifted. The question is what you do about hiring when it has. The reflex that costs you I have seen this pattern repeatedly with clients. Market uncertainty hits, and the reflex is to freeze. No new hires. No conversations. Wait and see. Sometimes that is the right call. Often it is not. The problem with freezing is that it assumes the future will be clearer than the present. It rarely is. What happens instead is that you defer decisions for six months, the market stays uncertain, and you have lost six months of capacity. One business owner I worked with in London last year froze hiring in March. By September, she had turned down £47,000 in projects because she did not have the people to deliver them. The market never got clearer. She just waited longer than her competitors. What actually matters right now When the market shifts, hiring decisions should get sharper, not slower. Here is how I think about it: Revenue-generating versus support roles. In uncertain markets, I bias heavily toward roles that directly bring in money or deliver to clients. If a hire will not generate or protect revenue within 90 days, I question whether it is the right time. Fixed cost versus variable cost. Full-time employees are fixed costs. Contractors and freelancers are variable. When you cannot predict demand six months out, variable costs give you room to adjust. That does not mean never hire permanently. It means be honest about what you can predict. Capability gaps versus comfort hires. Some hires fill a genuine gap in what your business can do. Others just make existing work slightly easier. In a tight market, the gap-fillers matter more. The comfort hires can wait. The 90-day question I use a simple filter with clients now. Before any hire, ask: what will this person have delivered in 90 days that we cannot deliver today? If you cannot answer that specifically, you are not ready to hire. You are hoping that adding a person will somehow fix a problem you have not defined. This is not about being harsh. It is about being clear. The people you bring in deserve to know what success looks like. If you cannot tell them, you are setting them up to fail. When uncertainty is actually an advantage Here is something I do not hear discussed enough: uncertain markets can be better for hiring. When job mobility is low and people are nervous about moving, the candidates who do move are often more serious. They have thought about it. They are not just chasing a pay bump or running from a bad manager. They want something specific. I have also seen businesses pick up excellent people who were let go from larger companies cutting costs. The big corporate redundancy programmes often shed people who are perfectly good at their jobs but expensive on the books. If you are a small business that can offer something those people want, you can hire talent you would never normally access. One of my clients hired a senior operations person in February who had been made redundant from a FTSE 250. She took a 15% pay cut to work somewhere she actually cared about. Three months later, she had restructured their delivery process and saved them twice her salary in wasted time. The decision framework I use When I sit down with someone to work through a hiring decision, I usually push them through three questions: What specific outcome does this role exist to create? Not responsibilities. Outcomes. What happens if you do not fill this role for another six months? Be honest. If the market gets worse, can you still afford this person? And if you cannot, what is your plan? Most people have not thought through all three. The first question alone eliminates about 40% of hires I see discussed. The role is not actually needed. The business owner just feels like they should be growing, so they think about hiring. Growth for its own sake is expensive. Growth toward a specific capability is an investment. If you want a structured way to work through this, the Decision Matrix tool on alira.london is useful. It forces you to weight what actually matters before you start comparing candidates or options. What the market is telling you Low job mobility means something. It means people are holding on to what they have. It means businesses are cautious. It means the easy growth of 2021 and 2022 is not coming back soon. But it also means that the businesses willing to make clear, sharp decisions will stand out. If you know exactly what you need and why, you can move faster than competitors who are still frozen. The market is not telling you to stop hiring. It is telling you to stop hiring vaguely. What to do this week Audit your current team against outcomes. Write down the three most important outcomes your business needs in the next 90 days. Then write down who is responsible for each. If you have gaps, those are your real hiring priorities. Run one role through the 90-day question. If you are considering any hire right now, write a single sentence: "In 90 days, this person will have delivered X." If you cannot write that sentence, pause the hire. Check your fixed versus variable ratio. Add up your fixed monthly costs for staff. Add up your variable costs for contractors and freelancers. If fixed is more than 70% of total people cost and you cannot predict your revenue six months out, think about rebalancing.