Hiring and Recruitment Archives

You can lose the right candidate before you make an offer.

Set the salary too low and strong candidates drop out. Benchmark against the wrong level and you spend weeks targeting the wrong profiles. Pay for the title instead of the responsibility and you stretch your hiring budget without getting the capability you need.

For startups and scale-ups, compensation needs to be right before the search starts.

A Lead Applied AI Engineer can command up to £165k.
Lead Rust Engineers reach £160k.
CTO salaries extend to £250k+.

Those figures are useful, but the range alone doesn’t tell you what to pay. Company stage, technical complexity, ownership, seniority and equity all shape the package.

TRG’s London Startup & Scale-Up Salary Guide 2026 brings those benchmarks together using our active hiring data from around 60 placements and almost 150 hiring campaigns.

Here are some interesting numbers to review before you set your next hiring budget.

What is an AI Engineer salary in London?

AI salaries start relatively close together, but the gap widens as roles become more senior and specialised.

Role	Junior	Senior	Lead
AI Engineer	£45k–£60k	£100k–£130k	£120k–£160k
ML Engineer	£45k–£60k	£100k–£130k	£120k–£160k
Data Scientist	£45k–£60k	£85k–£100k	£110k–£130k
Applied AI Engineer	£45k–£60k	£100k–£130k	£130k–£165k
LLM Engineer	£45k–£60k	£100k–£130k	£120k–£160k

For hiring teams, that difference can materially change the budget for an AI hire. Start with the capability you need, the problems they will own and the level of production experience required. Benchmarking against “AI” as one market risks setting the wrong salary before the search begins.

The full guide breaks down compensation by role and seniority, so you can benchmark the specific capability you’re hiring rather than relying on a broad job title.

Leadership salaries reach £250k+

Leadership salary bands widen considerably at executive level, where the same title can represent very different levels of organisational responsibility.

Role	Permanent	Contract Lead
CTO	£130k–£250k+	£1,800+
VP / Engineering Director	£120k–£180k+	£1,300+
Head of Engineering	£120k–£140k	£800+
Engineering Manager	£100k–£130k	£700+
Chief Product Officer	£180k–£250k	£1,600+

All contract rates shown are benchmarked for outside IR35 engagements.

The difference is clearest at executive level. CTO salaries span £130k–£250k+, compared with £100k–£130k for Engineering Managers. Chief Product Officer salaries range from £180k–£250k.

A £120k range within a single CTO benchmark tells you why the title cannot set the budget on its own. An early-stage CTO building the function from the ground up and a CTO leading an established engineering organisation may carry the same title but very different scope.

The full guide gives hiring teams the wider benchmarks needed to compare leadership compensation across Technology, Product and Go-to-Market.

What else is inside the 2026 Salary Guide?

The full guide covers permanent salary benchmarks and contract day rates across Technology, Product, Go-to-Market, Delivery & Change and Leadership & Executive. It compares compensation across junior, mid, senior and lead levels, alongside typical equity ranges by role and funding stage.

The guide helps you define, benchmark and budget for a role before you enter the market, rather than relying on a headline salary or job title.

How to use salary benchmarks when hiring

Benchmark the role you actually need. Define the scope, seniority and ownership expected before deciding what the role should pay.

Build the complete offer. Check that salary, equity and the wider package match the experience you expect to attract. For startups, equity can play a significant role in an offer’s overall value.

Sense-check live hiring processes. If a search is stalling, compare the package with current benchmarks before changing the brief or widening the candidate pool.

Plan future hiring budgets. Understand the cost of adding specialist capability, growing a function or making a leadership hire before the headcount becomes urgent.

Benchmark your next hire with current market data

The full London Startup & Scale-Up Salary Guide 2026 includes permanent salary benchmarks across Technology, Product, Go-to-Market, Delivery & Change and Leadership & Executive, alongside contract rates where an established market exists and typical equity ranges by role and funding stage.

Benchmark your next role, offer or hiring budget against the full data.

Download the London Startup & Scale-Up Salary Guide 2026

When something isn’t working in your people or talent function, it’s tempting to jump straight to a fix. Hire a recruiter. Buy another tool. Add another process. But if you haven’t worked out what’s broken, you’re paying to fix the wrong thing.

“We’ve had the deck. We’ve had the recruiter. Nothing’s actually changed.”

It happens repeatedly in scaling companies. Hiring takes too long, so you add recruitment resource. Attrition rises, so retention becomes the priority. Managers are struggling, so leadership training gets commissioned. AI gets introduced because everyone else is using it.

Each response makes sense on its own. None of it is a people plan. It’s a series of reactions dressed up as one.

That’s the thinking behind amity, TRG’s new people and talent advisory service for scaling companies. Led by Lauren Vint-McGee, amity starts with the problem rather than the solution.

“Most people who get in touch won’t know exactly what they need when something in their people or talent function isn’t working, and they shouldn’t have to.”

In short: amity is TRG’s people and talent advisory service for scaling companies. Led by Lauren Vint-McGee, it helps businesses work out what they actually need, then provides the right level of people and talent expertise to address it.

Scaling exposes the gaps in your people function

Early-stage businesses make people decisions however they need to. The founder handles hiring. A COO picks up HR. Managers create their own processes. Someone introduces a new tool because the old spreadsheet has finally stopped cutting it.

At ten people, that flexibility can be useful. At 50, 100 or 200, the same decisions start colliding.

You hear: “No one owns this.”

Senior leadership pays attention to the people function when someone leaves, a hire goes wrong, or the team is visibly struggling. By then, the problem is already affecting the business.

Responsibility has grown, but ownership, expertise and infrastructure haven’t necessarily grown with it.

The obvious answer may be to hire a senior People or Talent leader. Sometimes that’s exactly right. Often what the business needs is narrower: senior leadership two days a week rather than five, a rebuilt hiring strategy, or an experienced outsider to challenge the decisions already being made.

Before adding headcount, you need to know what problem you’re trying to solve.

Diagnose first, then decide what you need

Lauren puts it like this:

“If your car starts making a funny noise, you take it to a mechanic, obvious problem or not. You want someone who can actually diagnose and fix the issue, not just tell you what parts they have in stock, or paint it a nice colour.”

You expect them to find the problem first. People and talent shouldn’t be any different.

If the answer isn’t clear, amity runs a diagnostic before anyone spends money solving the wrong problem. What follows depends on what it finds.

ROOTS Diagnostic. A structured look at what’s happening across your people and talent function, and a clear plan off the back of it.
Fractional People & Talent Leadership. Senior expertise for the days you need it, not the days you don’t.
Embedded Talent. Experienced recruiters and talent specialists working inside your team, without adding permanent headcount.
Talent Strategy & Advisory. Building the strategy and infrastructure behind hiring, retention and growth, or fixing what’s already there.
Executive Coaching. One-to-one support built for the pressure of people and talent decisions, not generic leadership advice.

The service changes because the problem changes.

Technology speeds up the process. It doesn’t replace the thinking.

The tools have made hiring faster, but they haven’t made the decisions behind it any better. Lauren is an advocate for using AI where it makes work faster and better, but not where it replaces independent thinking.

At amity, technology supports the process. Human judgement stays behind the people and hiring decisions that matter.

“In the people and talent industry, only human interaction can create real trust…Build the infrastructure with AI all you like, but the actions should still be entirely human.”

Meet Lauren Vint-McGee, founder of amity

Lauren sits on the board and leads the strategy behind its Talent Solutions offering. After 20 years in delivery, operations, commercial, strategy, and implementation, she’s now bringing that experience to amity.

For Lauren, amity is about giving businesses access to the right level of expertise at the right point in their growth, and giving new talent leaders the support to grow into increasingly complex roles.

Not every people problem needs another hire

TRG has spent 15 years helping businesses across London’s technology ecosystem build their teams. Amity expands what that support can look like.

Sometimes the right next step isn’t another hire. It’s understanding what your business actually needs before you make one.

If you’ve moved beyond ad hoc and aren’t sure what comes next, get in touch.

Speak to Lauren Vint-McGee
Email: lvint@trg-uk.com

Most founders expect hiring to get easier after the first few years. In reality, the opposite often happens.

The hardest hiring stage is not building the first team. It’s building the next one.

Founders know the business inside out, interview every candidate themselves, and make decisions quickly.

As the company grows, that changes.

Hiring decisions become distributed across managers. New functions emerge. Leadership teams need different capabilities. Headcount grows faster than the systems supporting it.

This is the scale-up moment.

The scale-up moment is when hiring complexity increases faster than capability.

Why scale-up hiring becomes more complex

Hiring challenges are not unique to scale-ups.

Recent hiring data found that 58% of employers are struggling to fill roles, while 25% report losing talent to stronger offers.

Scale-ups face an additional layer of complexity because they’re not just filling vacancies. They’re building teams, leadership structures, and functions at the same time.

The hiring approach that worked at 20 employees rarely works at 100. Processes drift as the team grows. Different managers assess candidates differently. Hiring priorities compete for attention. Internal teams are stretched between immediate needs and longer-term planning.

Growth creates more hiring activity.
Scale creates more hiring complexity.

58% struggling to fill roles | 25% losing talent

58% of employers are struggling to fill roles. 25% report losing talent to better offers.

Source: Totaljobs Hiring Trends Update

From Series B hiring to building functions

Early-stage hiring is largely about finding great people. Scale-up hiring is creating the conditions to hire great people consistently.

The challenge shifts from hiring individuals to building functions.

Founders start asking different questions.

How should teams be structured over the next 12 to 24 months?
What leadership capability is needed to support growth?
Which hires create the greatest impact across the wider business?
How can hiring standards remain consistent as more people become involved in the process?

Poor hiring structure slows growth long before hiring stops altogether.

Without clear ownership, aligned processes, and a realistic hiring roadmap, growth starts to expose weaknesses.

Hiring becomes reactive. Decision-making slows down. Quality becomes harder to maintain.

Why hiring infrastructure matters as teams scale

Hiring infrastructure rarely gets the same attention as revenue growth, product development, or expansion plans.

Yet it often determines whether those plans can be delivered.

As headcount grows, more people become involved in hiring decisions; more functions compete for talent and more processes emerge.

Without structure, hiring quality becomes inconsistent.

The strongest scale-ups create clarity around how hiring decisions are made, who owns them, and what good looks like across the business.

That allows them to scale headcount without creating friction, confusion, or avoidable hiring mistakes.

Why embedded hiring partners outperform at scale

Filling a vacancy doesn’t require understanding the business. Building a function does.

Hiring decisions don’t exist in isolation at scale.

A leadership hire reshapes team structure.
An engineering hire affects delivery capacity.
A commercial hire influences growth plans.

The further a company scales, the more connected those decisions become.

That is why many scale-ups move away from transactional recruitment relationships. They need partners who understand where the business is heading, not just what it needs today.

Embedded partnerships create value through context, consistency, and a long-term understanding of the business. Not through volume of placements, but through depth of relationship.

Building hiring capability for the next stage of growth with TRG

The shift from hiring individuals to building functions is one of the defining moments in every growth company.

From what we’re seeing in the market, the businesses that scale successfully invest in structure early. They keep hiring decisions aligned to business goals. They make sure the way they hire at 50 employees still works at 150.

If hiring is starting to feel more complex than your organisation is prepared for, you’ve reached the scale-up moment.

Speak to TRG

Most scale-ups have stopped waiting for the hiring market to ease. They’ve worked out that it isn’t going to.

The UK skills gap is no longer cyclical. It is structural.

Across engineering, AI, digital infrastructure, and specialist technical hiring, demand continues to outpace supply. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Global Talent Shortage Survey found that 73% of UK employers report difficulty filling roles, above the global average of 72%.

For scale-ups, that turns hiring from a recruitment issue into a board-level growth constraint. It affects delivery timelines, product development, operational scale, and long-term growth.

Why the UK skills gap is now a growth constraint

The UK technology market has matured quickly over the last decade.

More VC-backed companies are competing for the same experienced talent pools across engineering, AI, data, and leadership hiring. At the same time, experienced technical talent remains limited.

That imbalance is now a structural constraint on growth.

The challenge is not generating applications. Most companies can do that. The challenge is hiring people with the technical capability, leadership experience, and operational fit required to scale a business.

That gets harder when hiring plans change quarter to quarter, when leadership teams are hiring roles they have not hired before, when internal recruitment capability is stretched, and when hiring partners focus on speed over alignment.

This is where growth slows. Not because companies lack ambition or investment. Because hiring infrastructure has not kept pace with the business.

The strongest companies treat hiring as infrastructure

From what we’ve seen in the market, the strongest scale-ups treat hiring as a growth function.

Instead of: “How quickly can we fill this role?”
They ask: “What capability do we need to build over the next 12 to 24 months?”

They plan earlier, hire against business priorities, build long-term talent relationships, and move decisively when the right people become available.

That approach changes how businesses scale, directly affecting delivery speed, technical capability, operational stability, and long-term growth.

This is how stronger hiring decisions create a competitive advantage.

Why transactional recruitment breaks down in specialist markets

Transactional recruitment models struggle in structurally constrained markets, especially across AI and machine learning, engineering leadership, platform and infrastructure hiring, specialist software engineering, and technical product and data functions.

The issue is rarely sourcing volume. The problems show up later:

Technical capability is overstated
Role scope shifts mid-process
Hiring managers are misaligned
Assessment processes fail to test real capability
Candidates disengage because the process lacks clarity

In specialist markets, hiring quality depends on understanding the business, not just the role. That means understanding the technical environment, knowing how the business is scaling, identifying where capability gaps exist, and positioning the opportunity properly to experienced candidates.

This is why more scale-ups are moving toward embedded hiring partnerships instead of rotating agencies.

How UK scale-ups will win the hiring race in 2026

The businesses building strong teams over the next few years will not be the ones spending the most. They will be the ones making better hiring decisions earlier.

That means building structured hiring plans, aligning recruitment with business goals, creating stronger technical assessment processes, improving hiring speed without lowering standards, and treating workforce planning as part of operational strategy.

Access to experienced technical talent is now one of the defining factors behind whether a company can scale effectively. The companies that recognise this early build stronger teams while competitors are still reacting to hiring pressure.

Speak to TRG

TRG operates inside the London high-growth technology ecosystem, supporting startups and scale-ups through critical hiring stages. The focus is long-term capability building, not short-term CV delivery.

We help companies hire for where they are going, not where they are.

If hiring is slowing your growth, get in touch.

Are you struggling to find the right talent to fuel your company’s growth. Even with all your hard work, your hiring approach could be unknowingly slowing you down.

In today’s market, attracting and retaining top-tier talent goes beyond than just posting job listings and conducting interviews. It demands a strategic approach that prioritises company culture, candidate experience, and more. Let’s dive into some common pitfalls that might be holding your hiring process back.

Failing to Sell Your Company Culture

Your company culture is the heart and soul of your organisation – it’s what sets you apart from the competition and attracts top talent. However, many hiring strategies fall short when it comes to effectively showcasing and selling the company culture to potential candidates. Remember, candidates are not just looking for a job; they’re looking for a place where they can thrive, grow, and feel valued. Make sure your job listings, interviews, and onboarding processes reflect the unique aspects of your culture and what makes your company a great place to work.

Overcomplicated Interview Process

Making interviews overly complicated can actually put the brakes on your hiring strategy. When you’re juggling multiple rounds of interview, tricky technical questions, and confusing logistics, it’s easy for both candidates and hiring teams to get lost in the shuffle.

Not to mention, dragging out the interview process can lead to top talent slipping through your fingers as they opt for companies with a smoother, more straightforward hiring experience.

72% of candidates say the smoothness of an interview process would affect their final decision on whether or not to take the job

Failing to optimise the candidate experience

The candidate experience plays a significant role in shaping your employer brand and attracting top talent. Yet, many hiring strategies neglect this crucial aspect, leading to frustration, disengagement, and negative perceptions of your company. From the initial application process to the final interview and beyond, every interaction with candidates should be seamless, transparent, and respectful.

54% of candidates have abandoned a recruitment process due to poor communication from the recruiter/employer.

Provide timely feedback, communicate clearly, and make the candidate feel valued and appreciated throughout the entire process. By prioritising the candidate experience, you’ll not only attract top talent but also leave a positive impression that strengthens your employer brand.

Underselling your job ads

Selling yourself short in job ads can put a serious damper on your hiring strategy. With talent bombarded by thousands of job ads, yours needs to stand out from the crowd. But here’s the thing – you’ve gotta strike the right balance. Your job ad needs to pack a punch with all the essential info while still being snappy and to the point.

So, before you hit that “post” button, take a step back and ask yourself: Does my job ad do justice to the awesome opportunity we’re offering? If not, it might be time to give it a makeover and let your company’s unique vibe shine through.

Inconsistent candidate scoring system

Not having a consistent candidate scoring system can throw a serious wench in your hiring process. A scoring system will help save your team time whilst eliminating any personal biases.

With a pre-agreed criteria and competency-based questions, each interviewer can compare scores following an interview, and discuss the candidate objectively, making it easier to compare and validate candidates’ qualifications. By consistently using this scoring system, you’ll not only make better hiring decisions but also streamline your hiring process in the long run. It’s a win-win for everyone involved!

Relying Too Heavily on Technical Skills

While technical skills are undoubtedly important, they shouldn’t be the sole focus of your hiring process. Overemphasising technical skills can lead to overlooking other crucial qualities such as problem-solving abilities, communication skills, and cultural fit. Instead of solely focusing on technical qualifications, consider a holistic approach that evaluates candidates based on their overall potential and ability to contribute to your company’s success.