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From the editor.
August is supposed to be the quiet month. Half the office is on a beach, the other half is refreshing a childcare spreadsheet, and nobody wants to make a big decision until September. The UK labour market, it turns out, did not read that memo.
If there is a thread running through this edition, it is visibility. Gen Z are quietly leaning on AI and then hiding it from their managers. Neurodivergent colleagues are masking so hard it is costing them their health. Working parents are "quiet parenting" their way through the holidays so nobody clocks that the kids are home. And job seekers are still being met with silence. A lot of British working life this month has been about being present without ever quite being seen.
So this edition is partly about pulling those people back into the light. It is also the month we put our own money where our mouth is on that last one, with the launch of the Stop Ghosting Job Seekers campaign. More on that at the end, and yes, there is a pledge.
Elsewhere, the jobs market has managed something it has not pulled off in nearly four years, degree apprenticeships have become harder to get into than some universities, and an over-50s insurer reckons the fix for an ageing workforce is to give grandparents time off. Make of that what you will.
The brief has not changed. Useful, current, properly British and never dull.
"Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don't want to."
Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group
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The stories.
01 · HR News & Trends · Fair Play Talks / Employment Hero · 20 August 2026
Your Gen Z staff are using AI. They just won't tell you.
Employment Hero's "AI Paradox at Work" study of 5,454 employees and 3,290 business leaders found that half of Gen Z workers feel guilty using AI to do their jobs, 52% say it feels like cheating, and 42% are using it without their employer knowing. The same proportion admit to passing AI-generated work off as their own. One UK jobseeker summed up the mood perfectly: "AI can feel like my dirty little secret." Among UK employers, 64% say AI has already changed what they hire for.
The awkward part is that almost all of this is happening in a policy vacuum. Where there are no rules, people invent their own, and those private rules tend to run on guilt and secrecy rather than good practice. Tellingly, 81% of Gen Z say they picked up their AI skills from social media, not from work.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
If you do not have an AI-at-work policy, your youngest colleagues have already written one for you, in private, and it runs on shame. A one-page "here is how we expect you to use it" note beats a ban you cannot enforce.
Read it on Fair Play Talks →
02 · Apprenticeships · BBC / PA · 19 August 2026
Degree apprenticeships are now harder to get than some degrees.
Figures released through Freedom of Information requests show applications for degree-level apprenticeships have quadrupled in three years, climbing from 8,100 to 21,800, while the number of places has almost halved, from 7,300 to 3,700. Competition for Level 6 apprenticeships has leapt from 2.8 to 11.3 applicants per vacancy, against a market average of 10.6. As tuition costs rise, an "earn while you learn" route that dodges student debt has gone from niche to heavily oversubscribed.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said teenagers "must have access to vocational career routes that carry the exact same prestige and earning potential as a traditional academic degree." The demand is plainly there. The places, just as plainly, are not.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
If you run a levy pot and a degree apprenticeship programme, you are sitting on something candidates are now scrapping over. Say so, loudly, in your adverts. This is a recruitment magnet many employers are quietly underselling.
Read the story →
03 · Getting your people employment ready · Chartered Management Institute · 9 July 2026
6% of managers say new recruits are work-ready. 45% of Gen Z say they are.
A YouGov study for the Chartered Management Institute, covering 514 people aged 18 to 24 and more than 1,000 managers, uncovered a startling perception gap. Just 6% of managers think young recruits arrive ready for the workplace, while 45% of Gen Z believe they do. Some 91% of managers say the resulting skills gap is denting performance. The biggest thing missing, according to those managers, is not technical ability but resilience, followed by professionalism, communication and the knack of taking feedback.
CMI chief executive Ann Francke OBE said too many young people "leave education with ambition, only to discover they haven't been prepared for workplace realities." Encouragingly, 86% of young employees said manager training mattered to them, so the will to close the gap runs both ways.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
"Employment ready" is mostly the soft stuff: turning up, taking feedback, recovering from a bad day. Build it into onboarding and early management rather than assuming school or university handled it. Nobody is born knowing how an office works.
Read the CMI report →
04 · Recruitment · KPMG & REC, UK Report on Jobs · 10 August 2026
The permanent hiring slump just ended. After 45 months.
The August KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs recorded the first stabilisation in permanent staff appointments after a 45-month decline, the longest on record. Temp billings rose for a fourth straight month at one of the strongest rates in three years, and temporary vacancies grew for the first time in two years. Starting salary inflation hit a six-month high, while temp pay reached a 26-month high.
KPMG's Callum Licence called stable permanent placements "a big milestone" after almost four years of contraction. This is not a boom. Demand is still subdued, and candidate availability is still rising on the back of redundancies. But the freefall appears to have found a floor.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
If you paused permanent hiring during the slump, expect rivals to start moving. The candidate market is still soft right now, which makes the next few months a far better window to hire well than the ones that follow it.
Read the Report on Jobs →
05 · Employee value proposition · HR Magazine · 2026
Grandparental leave: the perk nobody saw coming.
Saga, the over-50s specialist, has become the first major UK employer to offer paid grandparental leave, giving staff time off to help their own children with a new baby. With the number of workers aged over 65 up 185% since the early 1990s, and the 50 to 64 group up 85%, the logic is part demographic and part retention. PwC's Tilly Harries notes the policy also "contributes to female retention and attraction," because grandparents, often grandmothers, so frequently prop up family childcare.
It is tempting to file this under gimmick, but it lands on a genuine pressure point: the sandwich generation juggling ageing parents, adult children and grandchildren at once. For an ageing workforce, an EVP that only speaks to the under-40s is quietly excluding some of your most loyal people.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Audit your family policies for a hidden age bias. If every benefit assumes the employee is the one having the baby, you are overlooking a growing, and very committed, slice of your workforce.
Read it on HR Magazine →
06 · Wellbeing · Optimism Consulting / Business News Wales · June 2026
Britain's wellbeing system isn't underfunded. It's upside down.
A study of 130,067 employees across 23 organisations, "The Upside-Down People System," argues the trouble with workplace wellbeing is not effort or budget but architecture. Not a single organisation reached the top maturity level across the eight domains examined. Programmes flow downward, data flows upward, and the single most important relationship, between a person and their line manager, turns out to be the most neglected point in the whole system. Managers, remember, account for around 70% of the variance in team engagement.
Occupational psychologist Maria Paviour put it bluntly: "The architecture was built upside down." In plain terms, another mindfulness app will not fix what a badly supported manager is breaking.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Before buying the next wellbeing platform, ask two questions. What real-time data do we actually have on how people feel? And how well equipped are our managers to act on it? Most spend sits downstream of a broken manager relationship.
Read the study →
07 · Working parents · HRreview · 20 August 2026
Meet "quiet parenting", the summer tactic hiding in your team.
With holiday childcare now averaging £179 a week, roughly £1,075 per child across the six-week break, parents are increasingly "quiet parenting": working around childcare gaps without telling their employer, according to research from Coram Family and Childcare and Pregnant Then Screwed. Some 32% of parents now spend as much as or more than their take-home pay on summer childcare, and 40% expect to take unpaid leave to cover the gap.
Click Offices managing director Shane Duffy stated the obvious that many policies still miss: "working from home is not always straightforward when the kids are off school." Flexibility on paper is not the same thing as flexibility that actually works in August.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
The parents coping in silence are the ones most at risk of burning out or leaving. A quick, judgment-free "how is the summer going?" and real flexibility during the holidays costs nothing and buys a surprising amount of loyalty.
Read it on HRreview →
08 · Employing people with seen and unseen disabilities · Brain in Hand · 2026
More than one in seven of your people are neurodivergent. Most get no support.
Brain in Hand's Neurodivergent Experience in the Workplace Report 2026 estimates that more than one in seven of the workforce is neurodivergent, and finds that most receive no formal support at work. A great deal of the strain is invisible. Employees "mask" their differences to fit in, a daily effort strongly linked to exhaustion and burnout. Because the disability is unseen, the cost stays unseen too, right up to the point someone goes off sick.
The report sets out ten practical steps towards a more neuroinclusive workplace and makes the case that support pays for itself. The uncomfortable truth for many organisations is that they already employ neurodivergent talent. They just do it without the adjustments that would let that talent thrive.
Worth flagging in your next ELT meeting
Adjustments are not only for people with a diagnosis on file. Better defaults, clear written instructions, cameras optional, quiet space, agendas shared in advance, help the maskers you cannot see as much as the colleagues you can.
Read the report →
