Why January Is Too Late to Start Thinking About Your 2027 Security Team
By Zoe Woodley, Founder & CEO, MATCHUP Recruitment
Right now, most organisations are deep in 2027 planning. Budgets are being modelled, contracts are being scoped, growth targets are being set. It's a serious, deliberate process, and rightly so. But ask the same organisations when they'll start thinking about the people needed to deliver that plan, and the honest answer is usually later. January, maybe February, once the budget is signed off and the plan is real, and suddenly there's a role to fill. However, by then it isn't planning anymore, it's catching up.
That six-month gap, between deciding what you need to deliver and starting to look for who'll deliver it, is where most avoidable hiring pressure comes from. Not because people are hard to find, but because the search starts months after it should have. September is when next year's targets, budgets and pipeline start becoming real. It should also be when a second question enters the room: do we have the people to deliver them?
Start with the business plan, not the vacancy list
Good recruitment planning doesn't begin with "who do we need to hire?" It begins with "what are we trying to achieve?"
Is 2027 a growth year? Are you bidding for a data centre contract that will require SC cleared personnel before you can mobilise? Expanding into event or public space security, where Martyn's Law now requires venues to have formal security plans in place? Opening a new region where you don't yet have a local supervisory bench?
Each of those scenarios carries a people requirement, often one that needs a specific combination of sector experience, licensing, compliance expertise and client facing skill. The more specialist the role, the more expensive it becomes to start that search from zero once the pressure is already on.
Where are your workforce risks?
Planning isn't only about growth, as it's also about exposure. Every security business has people whose relationships, site knowledge or compliance expertise would be genuinely difficult to replace. If your operations director, or the supervisor who holds the relationship with your largest client, left in January, how long would it realistically take to find someone credible?
This isn't about recruiting people you don't yet need. It's about knowing, well in advance, where you're one resignation away from a problem.
What is the market telling you?
This is where a conversation with a specialist recruiter, like MATCHUP, earns its place. A good recruitment partner should be able to tell you more than who's currently job hunting. They should, for example, be able to tell you what's moving underneath your budget assumptions.
Take one scenario. The National Living Wage has risen by almost 46% since 2020, increasing from £8.72 to £12.71 an hour, and that has materially compressed the gap between entry level and mid-level security pay.1 An experienced officer can no longer count on tenure alone to command a premium over a newly licensed hire. Specialism or location increasingly must do that work instead. If your 2027 budget assumes last year's pay differentials still hold, that assumption may already be out of date.
Finding that out before you start recruiting gives you options but discovering it six weeks into a critical search does not.
Build relationships before the pressure is on
Some of the strongest people in the security sector aren't job hunting. They're performing well, valued where they are, and not actively looking. That doesn't mean they wouldn't consider the right move, yet identifying and engaging them takes time, market knowledge and relationships that can't be built in a six-week scramble.
Starting the conversation about your 2027 requirements in September gives a recruitment partner time to properly understand your business and culture, and to start quietly mapping where the right people already are. That turns recruitment from a reactive exercise into a strategic one.
Five questions worth taking into your 2027 planning meeting
Which roles will be critical to delivering our 2027 plans?
Where do we already have skills, capacity or leadership gaps?
Which people or roles would be particularly difficult to replace?
What new expertise could we need if we win the contracts we're targeting?
Do we know what it will realistically take to attract those people in today's security market?
You don't need every answer in September, but asking the questions now gives you far more options than waiting until January 2027.
Throughout September, MATCHUP is talking to security employers about their plans for next year: what they're expecting to recruit, where they anticipate gaps, and what we're seeing across the market. If 2027 planning is already underway in your business, we'd be very happy to compare notes.
Because January shouldn't be when recruitment planning begins. It should be when that planning starts paying off.