People decisions, without the jargon.

Core Protected. £149 a month. Everything kept legally current, ACAS-aligned procedures for every formal process, and me at the end of the phone before you act on anything serious. Call before act. Always.

Elite Scale. £299 a month. The full fractional People Director layer. Org design, manager coaching, performance frameworks, the works.

Recruiting Sprints on top when you need to hire. Fixed fee, not an agency percentage. Time-boxed, done.

And under all of it, ClarityLoop. The platform I co-developed. Your contracts, absence, onboarding and pipeline in one place instead of seventeen spreadsheets.

That's the product. Here's why it works, and I'll be blunt about it.

I've spent twenty-plus years in manufacturing, recruitment and startups. I've bootstrapped. I've sat where you sit, staring at a cashflow forecast wondering if the next hire breaks you. I've built a business and I've closed one, and the closing taught me more than the building.

I know the Scottish ecosystem because I'm in it every week. Venture Café, Techscaler, CodeBase, EDGE. The network isn't a logo wall, it's people who pick up when I call.

Big consultancies sell you frameworks. I sell you the shortcuts I paid full price for.

One person. One number. Always the same one.

Plenty of people slapped "fractional" on their LinkedIn the week after redundancy. No product, no method, just a day rate and hope. The sceptics aren't wrong that the badge is being inflated.

And yes, part-time senior help isn't new. Interim managers have existed for decades. Consultants have existed forever. So what's actually different?

Here's my honest answer, having sat on every side of this: consultant, recruiter, employee, founder.

A consultant is paid for deliverables. They arrive, diagnose, hand you a deck, leave. The deck is the product.

A freelancer is paid for tasks. You brief, they execute, you own the outcome.

An interim is a full-time seat-warmer for a gap. All in, then gone.

A fractional leader is paid for ownership. Not a report about your people problems. Accountability for them. Same person, embedded, month after month, carrying your context so you don't re-explain your business every time. The deck isn't the product. The outcome is.

That distinction is why the numbers look the way they do. UK fractional roles have grown several hundred percent since 2019. Around three quarters of UK scale-ups have used a fractional leader or are considering one, and most CEOs surveyed this year plan to increase their use of them. That's not a fad curve. Fads don't restructure how boards buy leadership.

Why now? Three honest reasons:

Economics. A full-time director is £100k plus before you've bought them a laptop. Most sub-40-person businesses need the judgement, not the headcount.

Risk. A bad executive hire is one of the most expensive mistakes a small company can make. Fractional lets you get the expertise without betting the year on one recruitment decision.

Supply. Experienced operators increasingly want portfolio careers. The talent chose this model as much as the market did.

The cons? Real, and worth saying out loud. You share your fractional person with other businesses, so availability needs managing honestly. Continuity depends on the individual, so vet them like a hire, not a supplier. And the badge inflation problem means you have to look past the title at the track record.

So: fad or rebrand? Neither. It's a correction. Businesses were forced to choose between all of an executive or none of one. Fractional is the market finally admitting that was a daft binary.

But do check what's under the coat.

Here's what that's actually like in 2026.

Adverts with no named contact. Portals that make you retype the CV you just uploaded. The same forms, over and over, into systems that never write back. Rejections for roles I'm demonstrably qualified for, delivered as a template, with no feedback and no route to a human. Internal talent management for tech businesses? I've done exactly that. Standard Dear John. No explanation.

And I have to own something. In my recruitment days, I was part of this to a degree. Not the worst of it, but part of it. Roles that were really pipeline-building. Candidates who deserved a call and got silence. You don't fully see it until you're on the other side of the portal. I see it now.

The numbers say it isn't just me. The average job posting now attracts well over 200 applications, roughly triple what it was a few years ago. LinkedIn has clocked thousands of applications per minute at peak. More than half of candidates report being ghosted by an employer in the past year. And in one survey, 81% of recruiters admitted their companies post roles that don't really exist. Ghost jobs, keeping the shop window full.

So candidates respond rationally. AI-polished CVs, auto-apply tools, volume. Employers respond rationally too. More automation, more filtering, less human contact. Both sides are playing the game correctly and the game itself is broken. It's been gamified to the point where volume beats fit, and nobody can trust the signal anymore.

Here's the bit that bothers me most. Behind every one of those 200 applications is a person refreshing an inbox. The process treats them as noise. Then those same companies wonder why their employer brand can't attract anyone.

I don't have a slogan-sized fix. But I know where it starts: a named human on every advert, feedback that says something, and treating candidate experience as part of your brand rather than an admin cost. It's how I run every hire I touch, because I remember both sides now.

I recently built a full handbook for a growing Scottish development business. Around 30 policies, from disciplinary and grievance through to AI usage and hybrid working. But the handbook itself was the least interesting part of the job.

Here's what they actually got:

A document control block in every single policy. Issue number, revision number, date, owner. Anyone in the business can open a policy and know instantly whether they're reading the current version.

A revision history that tells the story. What changed, when, and why. When a tribunal asks "what was your policy at the time," that question gets answered in seconds, not in a panic.

A legislative horizon scan. Every policy checked against what's in force now and what's coming. The Employment Rights Act changes alone touch more policies than most owners realise.

An accept gate. Nothing changes in a live handbook without the change being logged, reviewed and formally accepted. No silent edits. No "who changed this and when" mysteries.

And when the law moves? The affected policies get flagged, the correct wording gets sourced from Croner's legal intelligence, and the change goes through the same controlled process. The handbook stays alive.

That's the difference between a handbook and a living handbook. One is a document. The other is a system.

Most founders have the first kind. Sitting in a shared drive. Last reviewed when someone can't quite remember.

If that's you, no judgement. But maybe don't wait for a grievance letter to find out.

Here's what I did while it was closing: I studied. Finished my CIPD qualification while the recruitment business I'd built was shutting its doors. It felt absurd at the time. In hindsight it was the most useful thing I've ever done, because it turned a painful ending into an education.

That's where Chiron comes from.

Twenty-plus years across manufacturing, recruitment and the startup ecosystem taught me something the textbooks don't cover. There's a gap in this market you could drive a bus through.

If you're a founder with somewhere between your first hire and 40 staff, your HR options are grim. On one side, the national call centres. A different voice every time, reading from a script, built for volume. On the other, a full-time People Director at £100k plus. Brilliant, but you can't justify it, and honestly you don't need five days a week of it.

So founders do what founders do. They wing it. They Google employment law at 10pm. They copy a contract from a mate's business. It works until the day it very much doesn't.

The gap is the middle. A proper People Director, embedded in your business, who knows your team by name, backed by real legal intelligence, for a fraction of the salary. Not a helpline. A person.

Why now? Because the timing has finally caught up with the idea. Employment law is changing faster than any small business can track on its own. Fractional leadership has gone from novelty to normal. And founders have stopped believing that "we'll sort HR later" is a strategy.

I built the thing I kept wishing existed every time I watched a good founder make an avoidable mess.

One failed business. Two decades of watching what goes wrong with people. That's the CV that matters.

Behind every Founder, a Chiron.

Ask anyone to name a Greek hero. Achilles. Jason. Heracles. Ajax. Even my namesake, Percy Jackson! 🔱

Now ask who trained them.

One answer. Chiron.

The wisest of the centaurs. While the others were chaos on four legs, Chiron was the teacher. Medicine, music, strategy, ethics. Kings didn't send their sons to an academy. They sent them to Chiron, and Chiron sent back heroes.

Here's the part that gets me, though. Chiron was wounded by a poisoned arrow. A wound that could never heal. The greatest healer in mythology couldn't fix himself. So he did something better. He poured everything he knew into the people he taught. His pain became their preparation.

The Greeks called it the wounded healer. The Stoics approved: you don't control what happens to you, only what you build from it.

I've built a business. I've closed a business. I've hired well, hired badly, restructured, grown teams and watched things fall apart despite best efforts. Those wounds don't disappear. But they're precisely why the advice works. I'm not teaching from a textbook. I'm teaching from the arrow.

That's why the name isn't Jackson Human Capital.

Every founder is on an odyssey. Long, uncertain, occasionally featuring monsters. 🧌

My job isn't to be the hero of your story. It's to be the one who makes sure you're ready for yours.

Behind every Founder, a Chiron.

None of it feels urgent. That is exactly why it gets skipped.

The founders who deal with this early almost never end up in the situations that make HR feel frightening. Not because they were lucky, but because they built the boring foundations first.

Preparation is the cheapest insurance you will buy for your business.

The hire can be brilliant. Hardworking, capable, genuinely adding value. None of that protects you if the contract was wrong or the process was never followed.

Employment law does not grade people on how good they were. It asks whether the correct steps were taken.

Sort the process and everything downstream gets easier.

If you are not sure where your foundations stand, take the free HR Scorecard. It gives you an honest two minute score.

Picture a founding team of five who all think the same way. Every hire that feels like a good fit makes the group a little more alike, and a little more blind to what it is missing.

Culture fit filters for comfort. What early teams actually need is culture add, someone who shares the values but brings something the room does not already have.

Fit keeps the peace. Add is what moves you forward. Know which one you are really hiring for.

But the gap between no HR support and a full hire is where most founders sit, and it is where most of the risk lives.

That is what fractional support is for. You get the judgement and the compliance cover when you need it, without carrying the cost of a permanent role you are not ready for.

The point is not to hand off your people. It is to make sure that when something lands on your desk, you are not working it out from scratch under pressure.

Paternity leave is now a day one right. A new employee can qualify from their first day, not after a service period.

If your contracts or handbook still say otherwise, they are out of date, and out of date documents are the ones that cause problems when someone actually needs to use them.

This is the quiet risk with employment law. Nothing breaks until someone asks, and by then you are reacting instead of prepared.

Worth a five minute check of your paternity policy this week?

So instead of listing a generic menu of HR and hiring services, let me reframe it into the actual value and outcomes I deliver for startups and SMEs.

Founder-to-founder support. I run my own business, so I get the pressure. You aren't dealing with a call centre. This is direct, human-to-human partnership built on understanding your reality.

Peace of mind. No more guessing or stressing over HR headaches. You get a dedicated expert in your corner, ensuring your people operations run smoothly so you can sleep at night.

Compliance and risk reduction. Airtight contracts, clear policies, and proactive advice. I ensure your business is fully protected against costly legal missteps from day one.

Business growth. People strategy is business strategy. I align your HR setup with your commercial goals, removing friction so you can scale smoothly.

The right people, support and training. Building a strong business requires getting the right people on board, giving them the right management support, and delivering the right training to unlock their potential.

If you're juggling too many hats yourself and need someone to handle the people side of your business, drop me an email or head over to chironhumancapital.co.uk to book a chat.

It covers contracts, handbooks, your disciplinary process, and how prepared you are if something went wrong tomorrow.

Over 100 founders have taken it. The most common feedback is that it flagged something they knew they should have sorted but kept putting off.

If that sounds familiar, take the free HR Scorecard.

Not because the rules are complicated for one person, but because the habits you build with your first employee set the tone for everything that follows.

If you get the contracts right, the onboarding right, the expectations right from the start, you will never be scrambling to fix things later.

Every founder I speak to who sorted this early tells me they wish they had done it sooner. I have never spoken to one who wished they had waited longer.

The problem is most of these documents are out of date or missing things that genuinely matter.

At a minimum your contracts need to cover pay, hours, notice periods, holiday entitlement, sickness procedures, and your disciplinary process.

After April 2026 they also need to reflect the new rights around sick pay and parental leave.

If yours was last looked at more than two years ago, it is worth a fresh pair of eyes.

Before this year, most employment rights came with a qualifying period. Two years of service before unfair dismissal protection. 26 weeks before paternity leave.

That is changing.

From February 2026, paternity leave became a day one right. From April, parental leave and sick pay from the first day of absence joined it.

And day one unfair dismissal rights are coming in 2027. When they land, an employee will have full tribunal protection from the moment they start with you.

If you are hiring right now, your onboarding process needs to reflect this. Your contracts need to reflect this.

Are yours up to date?

Do you have a process written down somewhere? Would you know the right steps to follow?

These are the questions most founders never think about until they are right in the middle of exactly that situation.

Not a trick question. Just worth having an honest answer to.

The founder handles it the way they think is right, based on gut feel and common sense.

Common sense and employment law are not always the same thing.

Three months later they are looking at a tribunal claim they had no idea was coming, wondering how it got this far.

The documentation was not there. The process was not followed. The conversation that should have happened early on never did.

None of it was malicious. It just was not done correctly.

Getting the process right costs almost nothing. Getting it wrong can cost everything.

It means you get a proper HR professional, CIPD qualified, with real experience, working for your business for a fraction of what an in-house hire would cost.

Not a call centre. Not a helpline. Someone who knows your business, knows your team, and is there when something happens.

For most founders with 1 to 40 people, a full time HR hire does not make financial sense. You do not have enough going on to keep them busy full time, but you have enough going on that you need proper support when it matters.

That gap is exactly what fractional HR was built for.

What they have not done is follow the correct disciplinary process. No written warnings, no formal meeting, no documentation trail.

The kind of claim that follows can cost £15,000 to £20,000 and months of stress to resolve.

And in almost every case, it was entirely avoidable. One conversation before acting would have changed the outcome completely.

This is why getting your HR foundations sorted before something goes wrong is always cheaper than sorting them after.

If you are not sure where you stand, take the free HR Scorecard. It gives you an honest score in two minutes.

After 6 April, sick pay started from day one. No more three day wait, no earnings threshold. Every single employee qualifies from their very first day.

Paternity and parental leave are now day one rights too. Someone can join your team on a Monday and be legally entitled to take leave before the week is out.

And if you ever need to make people redundant, the penalty for getting the consultation process wrong has doubled. It can now cost up to 180 days pay per person.

These are not small changes. They are live right now.

Have you checked whether your contracts and policies reflect the new rules?

With rising overheads showing no sign of relenting, it's understandable that business owners are taking defensive measures. Now, personally I love a good cost-cutting review, but survival mode can trigger dangerous temptations.

When cash is tight, it's easy to view compliance, contract updates, policies and HR audits as "discretionary spending."

It's far from it. It's your insurance policy.

Trimming your employment compliance right now is the ultimate gamble of short-term gain for long-term pain.

In today's high-enforcement world we aren't talking slap-on-the-wrist warnings. A single procedural error or sloppy record-keeping slip-up can trigger fines that completely wipe out whatever temporary savings you made.

By all means, defend your margins. Cut the genuine fluff. But do not compromise on the compliance that keeps your doors open in the first place.

In the rush to handle the massive avalanche of job applications hitting our inboxes, founders are being tempted by promises of an easy life and running way too fast. The idea of simply installing an AI gatekeeper to do the sifting for you is massive.

The tech sales pitch promises speed, efficiency, and "unbiased" filtering.

The reality? We're completely ignoring the fact that hiring is, and always will be, a fundamentally human process.

When you outsource your professional judgement to a piece of code, you aren't just losing the human touch, you're also walking straight into a legal minefield.

Legal analyses this month from Clyde & Co have spotlighted a major 2026 boardroom risk: the "black box" tribunal threat.

Employment tribunals are increasingly warning that if a rejected candidate claims bias and your only defence is "the software filtered them out," you're highly exposed. If you cannot explain the exact, intelligible logic of how your automated tool made its decision, the courts are legally permitted to infer discrimination.

The software provider won't stand in the dock for you. The liability sits entirely with the employer who clicked "install."

We've traded real human conversations for keyword matching, and professional intuition for an AI agent we don't understand.

If you want to protect your business and actually find great talent this year, it's time to stop trying to out-tech a human challenge.

Keep humans in the loop: technology should assist your administrative workflow, never replace your final judgement.

Shift to transparency: swap to task-based assessments where real output determines the hire, not a hidden line of code.

Slow down to get it right: a bad hire hurts your culture, and an unexplainable AI rejection could break your balance sheet.

Hiring isn't a data-sorting exercise. It's a relationship-building exercise. Let's start treating it like one again.

That's exactly why I founded Chiron Human Capital: to provide straightforward, practical SME HR support without the corporate fluff.

I didn't get into human resources and talent management to push paper or recite employment law chapters. Over the years, I noticed a massive gap in the market. Fast-growing startups and hardworking small business owners desperately needed corporate-grade HR and compliance expertise, but without the rigid, detached corporate attitude (and without the eye-watering fees).

As a solopreneur myself, I understand the unique pressures of building, managing, and scaling a business from the ground up. I set up Chiron to be the grounded, reliable partner that Scottish business owners can lean on when things get complex.

I work directly with founders, directors, and management teams across Scotland to handle the critical people stuff, focusing on three core workstreams.

HR and compliance: straight-talking advice to protect your business, manage risk, and keep you completely aligned with UK employment legislation.

Talent and management: helping you source, onboard, and retain the right people who will actually drive your business forward.

Strategic growth: providing the management structure and leadership support you need to scale smoothly.

No corporate jargon. No generic templates. Just practical, human-to-human support tailored to the local Scottish business landscape.

Whether you're getting ready to hire your very first employee, or an established SME looking to tighten up your compliance, I'm always up for a coffee to see how we can protect and grow what you've built.

This is why the system is broken, and why the government just missed a massive open goal to fix it.

The government recently laid out its big plans in the 2026 King's Speech, talking a lot about fixing the economy and helping young people. However, there's a massive gap between the government's big talk and actual, practical action.

The government completely swerved a massive opportunity to support businesses. If politicians gave employers real incentives and financial backing to train people, it would de-risk the whole process. It would make it much safer and cheaper for a small business to take a chance on a beginner.

By failing to give employers that safety net, they're selling the next generation short. Right now, nearly one million young people in the UK are stuck without a job or training, while businesses are crying out for staff. It makes absolutely no sense.

I'm at the sharp end of this every single day. I talk to Scottish business owners constantly, and the number one complaint I hear is always the same: "Craig, there are simply no candidates out there."

But if you look at the job boards, you see a completely different story. While everyone is shouting about a talent shortage, almost nobody is actually advertising entry-level or graduate roles. We're all fighting over the exact same small group of people who already have three or four years of experience. It drives up wages, starts expensive bidding wars, and leaves businesses stuck.

This failure to incentivise training and fund entry-level hires means we're stuck in a trap of hiring from the middle, all whilst our native, fresh talent is being left completely behind by a system that refuses to invest in them.

We can't afford to wait around for politicians to fix this for us. If you want your business to scale, you have to break this cycle yourself. Stop hunting for the perfect, ready-made candidate who doesn't exist, and start building the team you actually need. When you stop buying experience and start building capability, your recruitment problems disappear and you give a young person the break they desperately need.

So, what's a Job Hogger?

Well, it's the 2026 phenomenon where employees aren't staying because they love your mission. They are staying because they're "hogging" their desk. In short, it's easier and less hassle to stay than leave.

Ironic, when you think that for the last few years the advice was "hold on to your staff", "it's so hard to replace them", and so on.

Confused? Me too.

But if we're honest, we have all encountered the Hoggers. The colleague zombies who are present in body, but officially checked out in spirit.

And stability is never a bad thing, but stagnation is a whole different kettle of fish. It's a silent killer for a scaling startup.

If you suspect your team is hogging their desks and hasn't had a new idea since 2024, it's time to check the three A's and deliver some tough love.

Attitude: are they all in, or just in the building?

Application: are they driven by the work, or just to finish early and hide?

Ambition: do they still want to climb the startup mountain?

In 2026, the best Scottish businesses don't just want people who stay, they want people who embody the culture.

Don't let your culture become a safe space for Hoggers. Make sure your team is staying for the right reasons and committed to the journey.

The era of the keyword-stuffed CV is over. AI gamed the system, and now the system is fighting back. The new (old) gold standard? Understanding what someone can actually do.

There's plenty of tech to help you assess talent, but for the founders and SMEs I work with, the secret is much simpler.

A "prove it" workflow.

In 2026, we're ditching the bots and hiring for the three A's.

Attitude: do they have the grit for a startup?

Application: can they solve a real task, right now, without a prompt?

Ambition: are they here to grow with you?

AI didn't break hiring, it made some businesses lazy. But it has just pushed us back to hiring humans again.

And no, it's not a great rush of folks changing career. It's just AI battering out 100 job applications in the time it takes me to make my morning coffee.

The result? Traditional CVs, and to an extent cover letters, are now a perfectly written commodity. If every CV is "perfect" on paper, then perfect starts to mean nothing. (I love a spelling mistake or a misplaced comma these days.)

My take: AI is a great tool to write a CV. So good, in fact, it just gamed your AI screening.

It can be useful to weed out some of the chaff, but when it comes to the final decision only humans can read between the lines.

That's why I help founders build the skills to hire, onboard, retain and train based on skills-based decision processes.

Stop hunting "who" (the fancy degree, the big-brand background) and think about "what" you need.

The new term coined is skills-based hiring, but you can just call it spotting the hidden gems.

It's not an algorithm, it's just understanding what someone can actually do. The three A's: Attitude, Application and Ambition.

Oh, and the earth-shattering method to achieve this? A simple conversation.

What is the FWA? It's a single enforcement body that combines the powers of the National Minimum Wage unit, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, and labour provider licensing.

Here's the founder's crib sheet. Three things you need to know:

1. Proactive inspections. Unlike a tribunal, the FWA doesn't need a formal complaint to investigate you. They have the power to conduct unannounced inspections of your premises and records to ensure you're playing by the 2026 rules.

2. New penalties. The FWA can issue civil penalties of up to £200,000 for serious non-compliance. They aren't just looking at the big players; they're specifically tasked with closing the compliance gap in the startup and SME sector.

3. The "big three" audit focus. Holiday pay: are your calculations inclusive of overtime and commission? Statutory Sick Pay: are you paying from day one? National Minimum Wage: are you accounting for the new £12.71 rate and unpaid setup time?

And a Scottish grant-lock warning: if you're scaling in Scotland, an investigation by the FWA, even one that doesn't lead to a fine, could be enough to stall your Fair Work First grant eligibility. Public funding in 2026 requires a clean bill of health.

The bottom line: the best way to deal with a proactive regulator is to have a proactive audit. Does your paper trail reflect the reality of your team's day-to-day work?

If the answer is "I think so," it's time to make sure. Drop me a line at craig@chironhumancapital.co.uk and I'll send you a free self-audit tool.

What has actually changed today?

Paternity leave: the 26-week qualifying period is gone. It is now a day one right.

Unpaid parental leave: the one-year service requirement is gone. It is now a day one right.

Flexibility: you can no longer block paternity leave just because an employee took shared parental leave first.

The founder's trap to avoid: there is a massive difference between leave and pay. While the right to take the time off is now day one, eligibility for Statutory Paternity Pay still requires 26 weeks of service. If your staff handbook doesn't explicitly make this distinction, you could be accidentally committing to full pay for a new starter that the government won't reimburse you for.

The Scottish context: if you are scaling past 21 employees and applying for Scottish Government grants this month, these day one rights are now a core part of the Fair Work First criteria. You don't just need to follow them, you need to evidence that you are promoting them.

Action plan for today: audit your handbooks (if they still mention a 26-week qualifying period for leave, they are legally incorrect as of this morning), train managers (a request for parental leave in week one is now a legal right, not an unreasonable request), and check the pay gap (make sure payroll knows the difference between the new day one leave and the 26-week pay rules).

The 2026 regulatory wave is here. Don't let your compliance fall behind your growth.

Really chuffed with myself for attaining this as a "mature" student, and whilst of course running a business.

Thanks to everyone who helped along the way, and congratulations to the rest of the Level 5 cohort at Edinburgh College.

At times it makes me feel like a Luddite, but in reality I'm far from it. I have to remind myself that my value is as a subject matter expert. My clients need my expertise, not my ability to instantly deploy a new algorithm. So the goal isn't to match the pace of AI development. It's to manage the speed of adoption so I stay sane and safe.

Here's my anti-stress rulebook.

Keep purpose in mind. Before deploying anything, fill in this one sentence: AI will help me do X so I can achieve Y. If you can't, the tool is a distraction, not a solution. Wait until a painful, repetitive task demands automation.

Guardrails first, to protect client trust. My reputation is everything, so I set non-negotiable rules: client data or proprietary IP never goes into any public model, and a human must always review and take responsibility for any output. AI drafts, you own it.

Pilot small, useful things. Pick two small tasks that steal your time and patience: drafting the first pass of an email, summarising a long meeting. Measure success in minutes saved, not how clever the AI sounds. If it saves you 90 minutes a week and reduces errors, it's a win.

Keep the human in the loop. Think of AI as a very fast assistant. Use it for the boring, repetitive work. Your value is in the why, the client relationship, and the context. AI is here to remove the tedium, not replace your brain.

In short, stop worrying that you're missing out. AI is here, and it's coming for your repetitive tasks. That's more time for you, to bring you to the table.

So what's really going on?

This is a bold statement, but my belief is that it's not necessarily a talent shortage. It's a design problem. Too many companies are hiring based on outdated checklists: roles defined by yesterday's tools, not today's business outcomes; hiring that filters for the "perfect" CV, not proven ability; onboarding that expects new hires to be 100% ready on day one.

You can't solve today's problems with yesterday's hiring process, so try a design-thinking approach instead.

Empathise: what actually matters in the first 90 days? What skills can be taught quickly, and what can't?

Define: rewrite the job description around those outcomes. Create a simple 90-day plan instead of a list of "requirements."

Ideate: widen your search. Look at people from adjacent industries, career returners, or those with strong portfolios instead of a good CV.

Prototype: test for experience, not just skill. Assess ambition, attitude and adaptability. You're hiring what they're capable of, not what they did in the past.

Test: measure what matters: time to productivity, quality of work, and retention after 90 days. Then adjust your process.

Worth consideration? What's the hardest role you're struggling to fill right now?

If you want a hand with this, I'll personally review one of your job descriptions and sketch out a 90-day ramp you can use immediately. Email me at craig@chironhumancapital.co.uk

Hiring is hard, more than ever. Recruiters remain perceived as expensive and, in some quarters, a necessary evil.

And the old equation of advert, applicants, screening, hire doesn't work. It has become the default of lazy recruitment and helped create today's negative perception.

But if you strip it back, hiring has been, and should always be, about networks.

The real value in the hiring process sits with the person leading the search. Most great hires don't start with an advert. They start with a name, a warm introduction, a quick call that builds trust. Of course, process matters, and AI will play a role over time, but meaningful investment in a network is the value play.

The best people are not scrolling job boards. They are busy and they take calls from people they respect. One trusted recommendation can achieve more in a minute than the best written job post can in a month.

The best recruiters know this, and always have. They network daily, and you'll see them at industry events. Not the ones pitching or selling, but the ones immersing themselves in the market and making real connections. It takes time, consistency, and effort.

My take: AI is here to stay, and yes, process, candidate experience, and your tech stack all matter. But whether you hire in-house, direct, or through an agency, the smart play is to prioritise networks above everything else.

Treat adverts like marketing. They amplify your message and position your brand. On their own they rarely close hard-to-fill roles.

Hiring is people work, not paperwork. Lead with your network and back it with a clear process. Do that consistently and you will win the hiring race.

Personally, I have no issue with hiring in specialist international talent. If it benefits the local economy, safeguards existing jobs, and maintains industrial capability, then why not? But it has to be a short term solution.

This whole situation is the consequence of a lack of sufficient, consistent investment in vocational training for key trades and skills in Scotland. We can't be reliant on short term international recruitment to fix a failure in our education and skills system.

So, what can be done?

Investment. We need urgent, targeted investment in our schools and college sectors, and a genuine commitment to supporting Scottish businesses to take on more apprentices. Apprenticeships and sandwich degrees offer the key to closing these gaps.

Reduce friction. We also need to reduce the practical friction for employers. Our apprenticeship system in Scotland is well regarded, but the ask from business, especially SMEs, is simple: one front door, lighter paperwork, and hands-on support to set up, mentor, and retain apprentices.

The apprentices we train today are the skilled workers we need to fill these roles tomorrow. It's a matter of economic security and industrial resilience for all of us.

Is this the new norm for the UK economy?

Personally, I think this is a direct result of wider economic and policy shifts. The pressure on businesses, especially in the UK, is relentless.

Post-Brexit reality means ultra-lean businesses. A lot of businesses trimmed headcount to survive tough trading. The work didn't disappear though. It just spread thinner, across fewer people, often with less slack and no cover.

Tax rises. Everything costs more. Inflation, high energy costs and recent tax increases on businesses are hurting industry. What's the first cut when costs go up? Usually hiring for capacity, which means existing teams pick up the slack.

AI adding to the pile. The promise is efficiency, but the reality for many of us is just another learning curve. These tools only help when you shape them around your workflow. Until then, they can feel like extra homework.

Emotional burden. Especially in HR and hiring, you're holding other people's stress as well as your own. That load is real, and it accumulates.

Maybe double busy is here to stay, but if we are lumbered with running ultra-lean, we can still choose how we work inside it. We can design our weeks with a little more honesty, a little more structure, and a lot more finish lines.

The hard thing is pausing to fix the process. The very thing that can free us.

I have also had to significantly downsize headcount just to keep the lights on. Even the offices are going this month as we return to home working to save cost. Like many founders and consultants, I live with the daily worry and pressure.

I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm sharing this because stress, for many, isn't obvious or dramatic. It's the mind fog. It's rereading the same email three times, jumping between tabs, and feeling busy without actually moving anything forward.

Sound familiar?

For me, process beats panic, and I started treating busy weeks like operations plans. Every day begins with just three key objectives, not an endless to-do list. I have mini-playbooks for everything, time-boxing is non-negotiable and breaks are strategic.

Perhaps the most unexpected help came from my HR training. It grounded me. It wasn't about soft skills in the way some perceive it. It was about structure, fairness, and clear communication in tough moments.

I'm still passionate about the chase of recruitment. But my value now sits squarely where hiring and HR intersect: designing roles, building scalable processes, and coaching founders through the messy human bits that truly decide if a plan succeeds.

If you're feeling the weight right now, you're not lazy. You're not behind. You're likely carrying a lot. Start small. Pick one process improvement. Protect one block in your calendar. Take one real break. Write one honest line about what isn't working. Then do the next right thing.

This year forced an evolution. Recruitment remains core, but HR will shape how I do it. The future, for me, is helping businesses design work that works for everyone.