The ‘£3 billion talent paradox’ causing consulting’s hire-or-fire model to fail

While the largest consulting firms are planning for thousands of layoffs, the volatility of the sector means they may soon be having to hire again. BenchBee CEO Hassen Hattab explains that a more flexible benching model is required to break this hire-or-fire cycle.

While major consultancies have implemented significant workforce reductions and over 180,000 UK tech workers face redundancy, a staggering £3.06 billion worth of IT expertise sits idle across British consultancies every year. These aren’t unemployed workers, they’re fully employed specialists trapped on the ‘bench’ between projects, invisible to the businesses searching for their skills.

This highlights consulting’s biggest inefficiency: simultaneously hoarding talent and haemorrhaging it, all while 81% of UK businesses report critical skills shortages that cost the economy £4.4 billion annually, a figure forecast to reach £27.6 billion by 2030.

After more than a decade in consulting, I’ve watched this paradox play out countless times. One company has brilliant engineers sitting idle. Another loses a contract because they can’t staff it. The system struggles to connect these opportunities; it just sheds people during downturns and scrambles to rehire during booms.

We don’t have a talent shortage. We have a shortage of visibility and access to the talent.

Broken system?

For decades, consultancies have operated on a hire-or-fire model. Permanent staff bring continuity but lock in high fixed costs; freelancers provide flexibility but carry risks around quality and accountability. The result is a destructive cycle of over-recruiting in good times and mass layoffs when demand dips.

Industry analysis shows a typical mid-sized consultancy loses up to £15 million annually to bench inefficiency, paying consultants who could be solving urgent problems elsewhere. Meanwhile, traditional recruitment agencies charge 15-30% placement fees, yet research indicates significant gaps in candidate quality matching. 73% of hiring professionals say fewer than half of agency candidates meet their listed criteria.

The ‘flexible workforce’ promised to solve this. Instead, it created new problems: patchy screening, inconsistent standards, and spiralling costs. Behind those numbers are real people, experienced engineers, analysts, and developers who find themselves benched, disengaged, and invisible while projects elsewhere stall for want of their exact skills.

Hidden costs

This happens because traditional recruitment and workforce planning can’t see beyond company walls. Talent sits locked within one organisation while another desperately needs those exact skills. They’re not on job boards. They’re not actively looking. They’re just between projects, waiting for their next internal assignment.

This hidden-talent crisis is one of the most overlooked inefficiencies in the UK economy. We’ve built enormous infrastructure to import overseas expertise through government initiatives, but we’ve done almost nothing to circulate the expertise that already exists here.

We don’t have a skills shortage; we’re just not sharing staff. There’s another option emerging, one that requires a fundamental mindset shift: seeing another consultancy’s bench as a resource, not competition.

By enabling vetted consultancies to share talent through secure networks, we can access skilled specialists when needed while allowing organisations to monetise their bench time. When one company has engineers sitting idle, another facing a deadline can tap that expertise instantly, keeping teams productive, projects moving, and people employed.

This isn’t outsourcing or freelancing - it’s collaboration. A smarter alternative that bridges the gap between permanent hiring and painful layoffs, where every professional remains employed, ensuring continuity, cultural alignment, and client trust.

The human case

Economic headwinds make this moment pivotal. Business investment growth is forecast to fall from 4.8% to 1.6% in 2025. With shrinking budgets, companies can’t afford to carry idle capacity. Yet 67% of digital transformation projects face skills-related delays, and half of consulting projects experience setbacks that frequently impact both profitability and client relationships.

Globally, IDC estimates 90% of organisations will face IT skills gaps by 2026, draining £4.18 trillion from the world economy. We can’t hire our way out of that deficit. We have to work differently.

Behind every bench statistic is a career in limbo. Skilled consultants often describe bench time as demotivating and isolating. Many leave the industry altogether after repeated periods of underutilisation.

Talent sharing transforms that experience, giving professionals continued purpose while keeping their skills sharp and protecting wellbeing through meaningful work. It turns uncertainty into opportunity, for individuals as much as for organisations.

The £3.06 billion trapped in bench inefficiency could become the sector’s greatest untapped asset. Early adopters of talent-sharing are already seeing results: higher utilisation, improved EBITDA, stronger client satisfaction, and new revenue from existing headcount.

In a market where unlocking hidden talent is the true competitive edge, consultancies won’t win through headcount, but through connectivity. The next decade will belong to organisations that treat people as shared assets, not fixed costs.

By breaking down artificial barriers and treating talent as a collaborative resource, the UK can close its skills gap faster, retain expertise, and build a more resilient economy.

The talent we need isn’t somewhere else; it’s already here. We just need to start working smarter with the people we already employ. Collaboration, not competition, will define the workforce of the future.

Hassen Hattab is the founder and CEO of BenchBee, the UK’s first talent-sharing platform for Tech and IT consultancies. After more than a decade in the consulting industry, he launched BenchBee in 2025 to solve one of the sector’s entrenched inefficiencies: the hidden cost of ‘benched’ staff.