Horsefly

The Site Reliability Engineer market has a skills gap problem - and it's getting worse. Demand for cloud-native expertise is surging and supply isn't keeping up. The result is that organizations relying on traditional hiring approaches are losing ground fast. Horsefly data points to where the pressure is sharpest - Kubernetes, container orchestration, and serverless architectures are the highest demand-supply imbalance skills in the market right now. Yet most active SRE candidates aren't equipped with hands-on experience across all three. The smarter move is to widen your talent aperture. DevOps, Systems, and Infrastructure Engineers with strong automation backgrounds are your most viable transition talent. Platform Engineers and Systems Reliability Engineers often carry the hybrid skill sets you actually need - even if the title doesn't match. Framing matters too. Roles that lead with sophisticated incident response, IaC (Terraform), and advanced CI/CD pipelines attract the forward-thinking engineers who are hardest to find. The organizations building operational resilience right now aren't waiting for the perfect SRE. They're hiring smarter. To uncover more about the SRE talent landscape, contact us today to book a strategy session - https://lnkd.in/eWES-cN6 

Most workforce planning struggles to get started - not because the strategy is wrong, but because the data behind it is. If you're forecasting talent needs based on gut instinct and last year's headcount report, you're already behind. The organizations that consistently get this right aren't guessing - they're working from real labor market intelligence. Our latest guide breaks down exactly how strategic workforce planning works in practice: from auditing your current workforce and closing skills gaps, to the buy/build/borrow/bot framework for building a future-ready team. Worth a read if talent decisions at your organization still feel more reactive than strategic - https://lnkd.in/edxURjTF 

Data overload or actionable intelligence? There's a massive difference - and Senior Resourcing & TA Leader, Rob, can prove it. Six years and multiple public sector organizations and every time, the critical roles that seemed impossible to fill were filled. Not through luck. Through intelligence that answers the questions that actually matter: ✅ Where ARE the candidates with these specific skills? ✅ What's realistic compensation for this role and location? ✅ Should we go remote-first or stay local? ✅ How difficult to hire is this role going to be? Rob reveals how he located non-working ICU nurses during COVID, transformed veterinary recruitment post-Brexit, and consistently attracts tech specialists to public sector roles - all without inflated agency fees or desperate overpaying. This is what talent intelligence looks like when it actually works FOR you. Real challenges. Real solutions. Real results. Watch the full conversation and see how data-driven recruitment delivers in the markets everyone else struggles with. https://lnkd.in/eCXH7sc4  

On this Memorial Day, we pause to honor those who gave everything in service to their country. Their sacrifice is not forgotten - today or any day. #MemorialDay #RememberTheFallen #HonorOurHeroes

I am hearing from Horsefly subscribers that one of the biggest recruitment challenges organisations now face isn’t always a talent shortage. It’s signal-to-noise ratio. The volume of irrelevant applications, speculative outreach and increasingly AI-generated applications is creating huge operational drag across recruitment teams. Recruiters are spending more time filtering than actually recruiting. That’s why the next stage of workforce intelligence becomes really interesting. The utilities discussion yesterday focused heavily on using data earlier in workforce planning to make better decisions before hiring starts. But the natural next step is to connect that same insight directly to the talent attraction strategy itself. If you know - • Which organisations already employ the skills you need • Which locations have the highest concentration of relevant capability • Which markets are oversaturated with hiring demand • Which competitors are vulnerable to attrition • Which skills are adjacent and realistically transferable …then attraction activity becomes significantly more targeted. Instead of relying purely on high-volume advertising and hoping the right people apply, organisations can start building much more focused talent engagement strategies through programmatic marketing, geo-fencing around competitor locations, audience targeting and skills-based campaigns designed specifically for the talent pools they actually need to reach. The outcome is often fewer applications overall — but far higher relevance and quality. That matters because reducing recruiter admin is becoming strategically important in its own right. Less time reviewing irrelevant CVs. Less time responding to speculative applications. Less dependence on reactive agency sourcing. More time spent engaging genuinely suitable candidates and improving candidate experience. Candidate experience increasingly becomes a differentiator when the right talent has multiple options. The organisations getting ahead here are treating workforce data not just as a reporting tool, but as the foundation for how they design hiring strategy, workforce planning and talent attraction together. That feels like a very different operating model from the traditional “post and pray” recruitment approach many organisations are still trying to scale.

RecFest UK is back at Knebworth on July 2nd - and so are we. If you're heading to the UK's largest TA event in 2026, come find the Horsefly team. We'll be there alongside thousands of TA professionals and Resourcing Leaders who'll be soaking up the latest thinking on the future of talent acquisition, exploring innovative tech, and having the kind of conversations that actually create change. See you in the field for some great workforce intelligence insights! Pawel Humanski, Mike Basnett Sandiford, Will Crandle, Steve Bebbington, Kim Tamble, Matthew Hassey, Neil Stewart, Simon McGrath, Stephanie Wardlaw, Peta Earles, Neil Munro, Declan Redden

Happy International HR Day to the people who make the numbers mean something. Behind every workforce strategy, every retention win, every "we hired the right person" - there's an HR professional who made it happen. #InternationalHRDay

"We can't compete with fintech salaries." Senior Resourcing & TA Leader, Rob, hears this all the time in public sector recruitment. And yet he consistently fills roles that private sector recruiters struggle with. The difference? Knowing exactly where to look - and what really matters to candidates beyond the paycheck. This isn't about working harder or posting on more job boards. It's about working smarter with intelligence that shows you: ✅ Where specialists actually live  ✅ What salary keeps you competitive without breaking budgets ✅ How to reduce agency dependency while improving quality ✅ Which battles are worth fighting based on difficulty of hire scoring Rob shares six years of real-world examples - from COVID crisis response to post-Brexit workforce gaps to attracting tech talent away from high-paying competitors. Watch the conversation and discover how mission-driven organizations win the talent war with intelligence, not bigger budgets. https://lnkd.in/eCXH7sc4 

How do you find intensive care nurses during a pandemic without poaching from already-stretched healthcare providers? Senior Resourcing & TA Leader, Rob, did exactly that. And he's done it again for veterinary roles post-Brexit, tech specialists in government, and countless other "impossible-to-fill" positions. His secret? Intelligence-led recruitment that shows you WHERE the talent actually is - not where you hope it might be. ✅ Geographic talent mapping that reveals hidden candidate pools ✅ Salary intelligence that keeps you competitive without overpaying ✅ Remote-first thinking that opens nationwide opportunities ✅ AI-enhanced insights that turn data into decisions Six years of solving public sector talent shortages. One conversation. Real examples from critical healthcare, public sector digital roles, and speciality hiring that others gave up on. Watch Rob's full story and see how talent intelligence solves urgent hiring needs in the toughest markets. https://lnkd.in/eCXH7sc4

With 38% of candidates pursuing Environmental and Sustainability Specialist roles identifying as female, this is a significant marker of both progress and opportunity in a historically male-dominated field. Is your sustainability team reflecting this evolving talent pool? Companies actively recruiting female environmental specialists are expanding candidate pools, introducing fresh perspectives to complex challenges, and building stronger stakeholder connections. Horsefly Analytics delivers comprehensive gender diversity insights across environmental roles, helping you build truly representative sustainability teams. To uncover more industry insights, contact us today to book a strategy session - https://lnkd.in/eWES-cN6