The Fashion Skills Gap: Are you recruiting for yesterday’s jobs?

Recruitment in fashion is in a strange place right now.

Brands can advertise a role and receive a huge number of applications. Yet speak to the people doing the hiring and you hear the same frustration surprisingly often: there are plenty of CVs, but far fewer people they would actually want to hire.

That experience goes well beyond fashion. LinkedIn research published in January 2026 found that 66% of recruiters said it had become harder to find qualified talent over the previous year.

The UK labour market adds another layer. The CIPD's Summer 2026 Labour Market Outlook found that only 62% of employers planned to recruit over the following three months, with employer confidence remaining close to record lows outside the pandemic.

So there are plenty of people looking for work, businesses are hiring cautiously, yet employers are still struggling to find the people they really want.

Fashion has its own version of this problem.

The jobs are changing

Some of the skills fashion businesses need now weren't part of the same jobs five or ten years ago.

Merchandising increasingly involves sophisticated data and forecasting. Product teams need greater digital fluency. Sustainability has moved from broad commitments into regulation, compliance, traceability and hard data.

Commercial roles increasingly require people who can combine strong customer relationships with a much sharper understanding of sell-through, data and how wholesale and DTC affect each other.

Digital and ecommerce may be changing fastest of all. The job now stretches far beyond trading a website or running advertising campaigns. Customer acquisition is more expensive, the way people discover products is changing, and brands have far more information available about how customers behave.

McKinsey and The Business of Fashion's State of Fashion 2026 identifies AI-powered product discovery as one of the major shifts facing the industry, while research cited by Shopify found that 68% of retail marketers were experiencing rising customer acquisition costs.

That means brands increasingly need people who can understand the customer, read the numbers and make good commercial decisions as the tools and channels keep changing.

E-commerce is becoming a broader commercial role

The strongest e-commerce people increasingly need to understand how the whole business fits together: product, stock, customers, marketing and the relationship between online, stores and wholesale.

McKinsey's June 2026 work on Europe's changing e-commerce market highlights shifts including AI-powered shopping, retail media and omnichannel intelligence.

Someone can be an excellent e-commerce trader and still not have the broader analytical or customer skills a growing role now requires.

Equally, asking one person to be brilliant at trading, CRM, performance marketing, analytics, technology and customer experience may be asking for somebody who barely exists.

Some fashion skills genuinely are in short supply

There is another side to the skills gap which isn't about jobs changing. Some technical fashion skills have been difficult to find for years.

Pattern cutting, garment technologists, machinists, technical product development and manufacturing knowledge are obvious examples.

Current UKFT research identifies technical skills as one of four key future skills areas for fashion and textiles, alongside specialist sustainability knowledge, cross-functional collaboration and capabilities including systems thinking and decision-making.

It also identifies gaps around manufacturing processes, legislation and compliance, traceability and data-led decision-making.

There is a longer-term issue sitting underneath this too. UKFT recently highlighted the ageing workforce within UK textiles, with decades of specialist sewing expertise approaching retirement and too few new entrants replacing those skills.

For an industry built around making product, losing technical knowledge has real consequences.

Digital product development adds another dimension. Traditional technical expertise increasingly has to sit alongside newer tools and ways of working.

This is one area where there really is an issue of supply, rather than simply too many unsuitable applications.

Perhaps the real shortage is skill combinations

This is where I think the skills gap gets particularly interesting.

Often the individual skills aren't impossible to find. It's the combination that's difficult.

You can find a wholesale person with excellent buyer relationships but finding someone who also thinks analytically about sell-through, margin and channel mix narrows the field.

You can find digital marketers. Finding somebody who understands performance marketing, CRM, customer retention, data and the sensitivities of building a premium brand is going to be more challenging.

Equally, finding strong technical product knowledge and digital fluency on CAD systems has been an issue for quite some time.

Have we made some jobs too difficult to fill?

This is the bit employers can do something about immediately.

When budgets are tight and every hire matters, there's an understandable temptation to write a job description containing absolutely everything you would ideally like.

Ten years' experience. Exactly the right category. Exactly the right channel. The right systems. International exposure. Management experience. Digital expertise. Strategic enough to lead, hands-on enough to execute.

Preferably someone who has already done precisely the same job for one of your competitors.

You can end up searching for a very small group of people without ever deciding which parts of that experience actually matter.

This is something we're working on with clients at LIFE.

Rather than starting with a traditional job description, we're helping brands create performance-based briefs.

We start by asking a different question:

What does this person actually need to achieve?

What needs to be different six or twelve months after they arrive? What problems need solving? What would make you say, a year from now, that this had been a brilliant hire?

Once you know that, you can look for evidence that someone has achieved comparable things before, rather than trying to find somebody whose CV happens to match a long list of requirements.

That can open the door to people you might otherwise overlook.

Separate what you need from what you can teach

Not every skill on a job description deserves equal weight.

Some things genuinely need to be there from day one.

If you're recruiting someone to lead international wholesale, for example, an established understanding of the relevant markets may be fundamental.

Other things can be learnt surprisingly quickly e.g. a particular system, or knowledge of a product category.

Work out which skills are genuinely critical.

This doesn't mean lowering the bar. It just means being absolutely clear on where the bar should be.

It also gives you a better chance of spotting transferable experience. Someone may not have held exactly the same job title or worked for precisely the same type of brand, but they may have solved the problem you need them to solve.

Look at the people you already have

The person you need may already work for you.

Before going to market, look at the skills sitting within the business and where people could develop.

Could an existing merchandiser take on greater responsibility for planning or collection merchandising?

Could somebody within product development build the additional knowledge needed for a new category?

Could a strong number two step up to lead with the right support?

Developing people internally can also help retention. If good people can see where they can progress and what they need to learn to get there, there's another reason for them to stay.

It also reduces the pressure to find every new capability externally.

Look beyond active applicants

High application numbers can give a false impression of the talent available.

Some of the strongest people in fashion aren't applying for jobs at all.

They're working, they're happy, they are definitely not scrolling through job boards to spot your advert.

However, they are often interested in the right conversation.

This is where a targeted search is very different from advertising a vacancy and waiting to see who applies.

A specialist recruiter should know the market beyond the available CVs. Who has relevant experience? Who has delivered something similar? Who may be ready for the next step? Who isn't actively looking but could have a very good reason to listen?

Make interviews prove something

Once you've decided what the person needs to deliver, build the interview around it.

Ask for real examples.

If the role needs somebody to improve full-price sell-through, ask them about a time they've done it.

If they need to build a team, explore the team they inherited, what they changed and what happened afterwards.

If cross-functional influence matters, ask for a situation where they had to get something done without having direct authority over everyone involved.

This is another area we work on with clients at LIFE, helping hiring managers structure interviews around evidence rather than relying heavily on chemistry or whether somebody happens to interview well.

Someone being impressive for an hour isn't the same thing as being able to do the job.

The fashion skills gap needs a more thoughtful response

There are genuine skills shortages in fashion, particularly in some of the technical disciplines.

There are also roles where the required skillset is changing incredibly quickly.

Then there are jobs where businesses may simply be looking for such a specific combination of experience that only a very small number of people could ever match the brief.

All of that can exist at the same time as hundreds of people apply for a vacancy.

The answer isn't to attract more applicants.

Start by being absolutely clear about what the job needs to deliver, which skills are essential and where you're prepared to develop someone.

Then go and find the people who can actually do it.

If you're receiving plenty of applications and still struggling to make the hire, increasing the number of candidates is not be the best place to start.

We're always happy to help you start with the right brief.