For housing organisations, vacancies are tangible risks to service delivery. They lead to delayed repairs, slower decisions, stretched managers, postponed programmes and extra pressure on teams. Yet many organisations are also dealing with budget constraints and talent shortages that make choosing to hire a difficult decision. That caution around housing recruitment needs to be approached carefully. With expectations rising around resident services and organisational performance, leaving the wrong role open for too long can create far-reaching risks.
This is amplified by wider employment reform. As changes introduced through the Employment Rights Act reshape employer responsibilities, organisations must reassess how they approach housing recruitment. Every hire carries a higher expectation of confidence. But excessive caution carries its own cost.
For housing associations, local authorities and other providers, workforce capacity is directly connected to the resident experience. A management gap affects caseloads and response times, while a vacancy in assets or property can slow programmes. Finance, governance and transformation vacancies weaken oversight and delay decisions intended to improve services.
The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) highlights the exceptional pressures and high turnover affecting first-contact housing roles, making it harder for some tenants to communicate with their landlord.
Decisions about housing recruitment need to account for what happens operationally when a role remains vacant. Identify the roles and skills you cannot afford to leave unfilled by asking which carry the greatest risk to residents, compliance, service continuity or strategic delivery.
Not every vacancy has the same consequence. Some housing recruitment can wait. Other capability gaps require faster action because they are already affecting delivery.
Start by assessing what depends on the role being filled. Housing finance is a good example of why role criticality cannot be judged by job title alone. There is growing demand for professionals who can combine financial expertise with data, technology, risk and operational understanding. Specialist capability around service charges, transformation and data integrity is also more important.
Leaders should have a shared view of critical capability and the point at which a vacancy moves from being inconvenient to becoming a service delivery risk. One way to do this is to ask some practical questions:
When a role is left vacant work is often redistributed to avoid service delays. Employees take on additional caseloads, managers provide cover and projects compete for less capacity. Over time, what was a housing recruitment issue becomes a staff retention issue.
UNISON’s Housing Worker Survey found that 77% of housing staff describe their work as stressful and a quarter reported taking time off because of stress. That should make leaders cautious about relying on already-stretched teams as a long-term answer to unfilled roles.
Additionally, hiring delays can exacerbate retention risks in areas where there are strong opportunities for the sector. CIH Futures research found that nearly seven in ten young housing professionals plan to build their long-term career in housing. However, respondents reported inconsistent experiences of career progression, training and management support.
Recruitment and retention cannot be separated. Clear progression, good management, realistic workloads and development all influence whether new hires stay.
Greater scrutiny should improve hiring decisions, not slow processes. For hard-to-fill roles repeated interviews, delayed approvals or unrealistic salary expectations can shrink the available candidate pool before a final decision is made. Hiring decisions need to balance:
To do so, social housing recruitment should be grounded in current evidence on talent availability, salary expectations, candidate motivations and realistic hiring timescales. If a role has been open for months, it may be time to revisit the brief, salary, working model, assessment process or route to market.
Benchmarking a role or reviewing your wider pay strategy? Explore Goodman Masson’s Salary Guide for the latest salary and market insights.
It may also be worth reviewing whether the recruitment model itself is still right for the organisation’s needs.
Permanent recruitment is not the only way to manage workforce risk. The right model will still depend on the scale, urgency and duration of the requirement. Permanent recruitment may be appropriate for an individual appointment, while interim, contract and project-based recruitment can address an immediate capability gap.
Alongside these, embedded talent solutions provide another option when organisations need additional recruitment capacity, greater consistency or support managing a larger programme of hiring.
You may need to recruit across multiple teams, deliver within a defined timeframe or add capacity to an internal recruitment team without increasing permanent headcount. In these situations, having an embedded talent partner brings recruitment together into one coordinated programme, with dedicated expertise and capacity flexing around demand.
There is also significant commercial advantage. Recruiting multiple roles independently can mean managing several agencies, each with a different fee structure leading to fragmented activity across departments. Having an embedded talent partner consolidates that spend, reducing reliance on multiple suppliers and creating greater visibility and control over the overall cost of housing recruitment.
For housing providers, that can be particularly valuable when hiring spans specialist and operational functions. Because embedded solutions combine access to deeper talent networks with the capacity to manage multiple requirements consistently, it gives internal teams more time to focus on workforce priorities, candidate decisions and the wider employee experience.
Reducing hiring risk does not stop when a candidate accepts. A well-run first six months can help a new employee understand what success looks like, build relationships and receive support before small issues grow.
There is a regulatory consideration as well. The Competence and Conduct framework places greater emphasis on how providers develop, appraise and support people, reinforcing the need for workforce planning to continue well beyond appointment. The Employment Rights Act reinforces the importance of strong people processes from the beginning of the employment relationship.
We recommend:
Housing leaders should also ask if managers have the time, training and confidence to onboard, support and assess new starters consistently. If not, the organisation may solve one vacancy while creating the conditions for another.
Because housing recruitment has such far-reaching consequences, the wrong hire can create disruption. While you cannot remove every hiring risk, you can make clearer choices about where risk sits.
Goodman Masson works with housing organisations to identify essential roles, understand where workforce risk is building and determine the recruitment approach that best supports continuity and delivery, including permanent hiring, interim expertise, project-based support and broader embedded talent solutions.
Download our report, The New Hiring Risk to understand how hiring confidence is changing and what leaders can do to reduce avoidable workforce risk.
See why caution around housing recruitment can threaten service delivery, staff retention and resilience and how UK housing leaders can respond with confidence.
