So someone raises it internally. A manager writes a requisition. That goes to TA, who may or may not have the right network for this particular niche. If they don't, they go to the PSL. Sometimes two or three agencies at once, because nobody fully trusts any single one to move fast enough.
Weeks pass. Candidates trickle in. Some relevant, mostly not. Screening calls back up in the calendar. The hiring manager, who was already stretched, now has half her week blocked for people who almost fit.
Eventually someone gets hired. Usually a few days after the actual need peaked.
And this is the point where I should probably mention a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first saw it: UK recruiters lose the equivalent of two full working days per hire to administrative tasks, nearly 850 hours per recruiter per year, at a productivity cost of close to £17,000 annually.
The top culprits?
None of that is inevitable. All of it is a process problem.
Contract hiring used to be a nice-to-have. Something businesses reached for when there was a short-term gap or a project with a defined end date. That's not really the world we're in anymore. SIA's 2025 global survey found that companies are already running contingent labour at 21% of total workforce on average, with expectations of 23% within two years and 26% within ten. Contract hiring isn't a workaround. For a lot of businesses, it's becoming how the workforce actually works.
Which means the friction in the process isn't just annoying. It's structural. Every delay, every compliance gap, every invoice that doesn't match the timesheet that doesn't match what the manager approved- that's all compounding, at scale, across your entire contingent headcount.
When I talk to heads of TA and ops leads across our verticals- technology, financial services, legal, energy- they rarely say the problem is finding people. The supply is there. What they describe is everything around the hire. The IR35 determination that nobody owns clearly. The umbrella company arrangement that now carries more risk than before (especially post-April 2026, when the rules on joint liability shifted). The approval chains that weren't designed for contractor timelines. The gap between "we need someone" and "they've started."
About 62% of applicants lose interest when hiring drags, and the best contract candidates, who tend to have options, disappear fastest.
The companies that have solved this don't just move faster. They've built contract hiring as infrastructure rather than a transaction: a single channel that handles sourcing, compliance, and payment in one place, rather than stitching together five vendors and hoping the handoffs hold.
That's what we're building at Myn. A source-to-pay platform for the contractor economy, with a network of specialist independent recruiters matched to the capability a business actually needs, not just the job title on a requisition.