The Employment Rights Act

Something's changing in January 2027 that most hiring managers haven't clocked yet.
Right now, an employee needs two years' service before they can bring an unfair dismissal claim. Two years is a long runway. Plenty of time to work out if someone's right for the role, plenty of time to course-correct, move them sideways, performance manage, whatever. The consequences of getting a hire wrong feel a long way off.
From January 2027, that runway shrinks to six months.
I don't think this is a bad change. Six months is a reasonable amount of time to know whether someone's working out. But it does mean the decision window just got a lot tighter, and a lot of hiring managers are about to feel that squeeze without quite understanding why.
Here's what I think happens next. Companies start making keep-or-go calls earlier, just to be safe. Probation reviews that used to happen loosely over months one to six start getting front-loaded into month two or three. Nobody wants to be the person who let a bad hire drift past the point where letting them go got legally complicated.
And here's the bit that's relevant to how I work. Most recruitment fees are due the moment a candidate signs, sometimes with a rebate window of a few weeks if things go wrong. That's it. If the hire doesn't work out in month four, or month five, the agency's already been paid in full and moved on. All the risk of a shrinking decision window sits with you, the client, and none of it sits with the person who found the candidate.
I built Time to Hire differently, well before I knew this law was coming. Fee agreed upfront, paid in stages, and the final half isn't due until your hire has actually been with you six full months. Not six weeks. Six months. The same window the law's about to make critical.
That's not a coincidence dressed up as a selling point. It's the whole reason the model exists. I've been on the other end of recruitment relationships where the agency's incentive stopped the day the offer was signed. It's a rubbish way to buy a service that's meant to reduce your risk, not just tick a box and disappear.
So while other agencies are still running rebate periods of a few weeks, and hiring teams are quietly panicking about a legal change most of them haven't fully processed yet, I'd rather just say it plainly: our fee is tied to the exact window that's about to matter most to you. If the hire doesn't stick for six months, neither does our balance.
Feels like a strange time for anyone to still be charging in full on day one.