A redundancy on someone's CV used to raise a flag. This year, it barely raises an eyebrow.
Restructures, cost-cutting rounds and shifted priorities have pushed an unusually strong group of candidates back onto the job market. Many of them did nothing wrong. Their team merged with another, their department lost priority, or their employer changed direction. None of that tells you how good they actually are.
That's the real problem for hiring managers right now. Availability isn't a filter anymore. The person who replies to your advert within an hour isn't automatically better than the one still weighing up whether to move. Working out who is genuinely exceptional, rather than simply available, has become the actual skill in hiring.
Why are so many strong candidates suddenly on the market?
Most of the movement isn't driven by failing businesses. It's driven by businesses reshaping themselves. A finance function gets centralised. A marketing team gets rebuilt around a new strategy. Companies remove a layer of middle management to flatten decision-making. The people affected are often high performers whose function changed shape, not people who underperformed.
This changes what "available" means. Two years ago, a strong candidate still on the open market after a few weeks was unusual enough to prompt questions. Now, roles that would once have taken six months of headhunting to fill are attracting serious applicants within days. The pool has genuinely improved. The challenge has shifted from finding candidates to reading them correctly.
How do you tell the difference between available and exceptional?
Start with consistency, not longevity. A candidate who stayed in one role for eight years isn't automatically more reliable than one who moved three times in six. Look at whether responsibility grew with each move, and whether they can describe specific outcomes rather than general duties.
Exceptional candidates talk in specifics. They tell you what the team looked like before they joined and what changed under them. They know their numbers. Available candidates tend to describe their role rather than their impact, and struggle when you ask for a concrete example.
The explanation for their move matters too. If someone says their employer restructured the whole department, that should be checkable and consistent with what you already know about that sector.
What should you actually ask them?
Ask about the mechanics of the restructure, not just the headline. Who else was affected. How the employer communicated the decision. What they would have kept doing if the role still existed. Genuine redundancy stories hold up under this kind of detail. Invented ones start to wobble.
Ask for specifics on their wins, and push past the first answer. "I improved the sales process" is a description. "I cut the average sales cycle from six weeks to four by restructuring how leads were qualified" is evidence.
When you take up references, go beyond the standard "would you rehire them" question. Ask what the referee would want this person to do differently in their next role. Good referees give you an honest, specific answer, and that tells you more than a generic recommendation ever will.
Does the redundancy itself need to worry you?
On its own, no. A redundancy tells you something about an employer's decision, not about the candidate's competence, provided the story is specific and holds together under questioning.
What should worry you is a pattern. One redundancy with a clear, verifiable explanation is normal in this market. Three moves in four years, each with a slightly different account of what happened, is worth slowing down for. The redundancy isn't the signal. The consistency of the story around it is.
This is where a lot of hiring managers go wrong. They either dismiss every redundancy as a red flag, ruling out some of the strongest candidates on the market, or they wave every explanation through without checking it. Neither approach protects you. The first costs you good people. The second costs you a bad hire.
How fast do you need to move once you've found the right person?
Faster than you think. Several employers are chasing the same shortlist right now, and a strong candidate from this market will not sit available for long once word gets round.
Have your process ready before you start interviewing, not after you've found someone you like. Know who makes the final decision, what the timeline looks like for a second interview, and what you're able to offer before you sit down with a strong candidate. A two-week gap between a great first interview and a formal offer is often enough to lose them to someone who moved faster.
Speed doesn't mean skipping the checks above. It means running them in parallel rather than in sequence, so a clear yes can turn into an offer within days, not weeks.
This is exactly the judgement call our team make every day, working across live restructures across the UK to bring genuinely strong candidates to our clients before they reach the open market. Talk to ACR before the best candidates disappear.