Twelve firms in the Midlands currently carry live job posts for architecture. We checked every one against the employer's own careers page, and only four are actually advertising architecture roles in the region. The rest are engineering, planning, product design and interior furnishings businesses. Two firms alone carry 38 of the 60 advertised posts and neither is an architectural practice, which means any read of regional demand taken from job-board volume overstates architectural hiring by roughly three times.
Strip those out and the region has advertised around twenty architecture positions in twelve months. Seven of the eight fastest-growing practices grew with no advertised roles at all. The appointments that matter here are made by referral and direct approach, so a practice recruiting only through advertising is competing for a small and unrepresentative slice of the market.
The pressure sits on retention rather than recruitment. Mean attrition across the region ran at 10.6%, but the spread is what counts: of the 29 practices large enough to report it, six lost a fifth or more of their people over the year and six lost none at all. Where a studio sits on that spread predicts its hiring burden next year far better than the roles it is currently advertising.
Birmingham is the market, at 1,820 professionals and 38% of the region, and one practice is absorbing a disproportionate share of the movement — Gensler took five of the twenty moves we identified, at every level from Architect to Technical Director, while growing headcount 33.3%. Anyone recruiting architects in Birmingham is competing with that. Coventry and Leicester, meanwhile, behave as separate markets rather than commuter extensions, so a studio drawing from all three is running three recruitment markets, not one.