You do not. You run a dozen local searches that happen to share a job description, and the programme is set by the worst of them rather than the average.
That sounds like a technicality. It is the whole problem. A national field force is the one hire where the total number of people in the country tells you almost nothing useful, because an engineer in Birmingham cannot cover an asset in Aberdeen, and the map of where the people are looks nothing like the map of where the chargers are.
How uneven is it, actually?
Here is the UK market as it stood on 28 September 2026. Every live advert for an EV charging engineer or technician, counted inside a 40km radius of fourteen cities:
| Catchment | Live adverts |
|---|---|
| Birmingham | 25 |
| London | 22 |
| Southampton | 14 |
| Bristol | 13 |
| Manchester | 12 |
| Glasgow | 9 |
| Nottingham | 7 |
| Cardiff | 5 |
| Leeds | 4 |
| Newcastle | 4 |
| Norwich | 2 |
| Belfast | 1 |
| Exeter | 0 |
| Aberdeen | 0 |
Birmingham and London between them carry more than the bottom ten put together. Two catchments had nothing at all, and those are not empty regions, they are regions with motorway networks, forecourts and charging estates that somebody has to maintain.
The number that matters for a national programme is not the total. It is the zero, because that is what you have to solve for in Exeter and Aberdeen, and no amount of strength in Birmingham helps.
What does that mean in practice?
Three things, and they all cut against how these programmes are usually run.
Launching everywhere at once is the wrong order. The instinct is to advertise all patches simultaneously because the programme starts on one date. The effect is that the easy catchments fill in three weeks, the hard ones are still open in month five, and by then the salary you set in April is being judged against an October market. Start the thin regions first and let the strong ones wait. They will still be there.
A national salary band is a decision to fail in the thin regions. Of those adverts, only around one in six published a salary band at all, which tells you how much of this market is negotiated rather than posted. A single band set from the middle of the distribution is comfortably competitive where you have most choice and quietly uncompetitive exactly where you have least.
Patches should be drawn around people, not around assets. The usual approach divides the country into roughly equal territories by asset count. That produces a patch in the south west that looks reasonable on a map and has nobody living in it. Draw the patch around where certified engineers actually are, then decide what the travel time to the far edge of it costs you, rather than the other way round.
Is this a UK problem?
No, and the same shape shows up wherever the estate is dispersed.
In Belgium one Flemish installation specialist has been running near-identical installer and service technician adverts across at least ten regions simultaneously, several of them open since December 2025. That is not ten roles. That is one role the company cannot fill ten times over, advertised in ten places because the people have to live there.
In Germany one hardware manufacturer has run nine separate field service technician postings across German cities at the same time. Both are the visible symptom of the same thing: the product sold nationally, the labour available locally.
Belgium’s public employment service has gone as far as classifying charge point installation as a shortage occupation. That is a government designation, not a recruiter’s opinion, and it is worth more than any market commentary you will read.
What actually works?
Sequence by difficulty, not by geography. Rank the patches by how thin the local pool is and start with the thinnest. The programme’s finish date is set by the last patch, so the last patch should start first.
Decide early whether you are hiring or contracting the thin regions. In a catchment with no local market, a subcontract or a partner arrangement may be the honest answer for the first year, and deciding that in month one is far cheaper than discovering it in month six. It is a legitimate answer, not a failure.
Pay locally, and say so. Regional banding is normal in field roles and candidates are not offended by it. What they notice is a national band that is obviously set somewhere else.
Count certified individuals, not headcount. In the UK, from 1 October 2026 every person doing charge point installation work holds their own Level 3 award rather than working under a supervisor’s registration. A national field force built on crews rather than certified individuals needs a bigger number than the plan says.
Hire the regional lead before the region. Somebody local who knows the trade in that patch will fill it faster than a central recruitment process, because in a market this thin the hire usually comes from someone’s contacts rather than from an advert. In two of those fourteen catchments, an advert is not a route at all.
How long should this take?
Four to six weeks per patch in the strong catchments, and considerably longer in the thin ones. Our own average across all roles is 22 days, but an average is a poor guide here for the same reason a national salary band is.
If a strong catchment is running past seven weeks, look at the brief. If a thin catchment is running past seven weeks, that is the market telling you something true, and the answer is usually to change the shape of the role rather than to keep advertising it.
Frequently asked questions
Should we use one agency or several? One, if it genuinely covers the whole country. Several regional suppliers will each solve the easy patches and leave you with the same gap.
Can we relocate people into the thin regions? Rarely, and it does not hold. Field engineers take these roles because they are near home. Someone relocated into a thin patch is a retention problem about eighteen months out.
What if we simply pay more in the empty catchments? It helps, and it does not create people who are not there. In a catchment with zero live adverts, pay moves someone from another trade or another employer rather than from a queue, and that takes longer than a premium suggests.
If you are planning a national field build and want the patch by patch read before you set the bands, book a discovery call. Half an hour, with the consultant who runs that market, and you get the market read whether you work with us or not.
Sources
- Live UK vacancy counts for EV charging engineer and technician titles, 40km radius, read 28 September 2026
- VDAB knelpuntberoepen shortage occupation list, 2026
- Electrotechnical Assessment Specification individual competence requirement, mandatory from 1 October 2026
- Net Zero Evolution market intelligence across 13 EV charging markets, reviewed monthly