Charging cable connected to the rear of a white electric car on a residential street.

EV charging recruitment · United Kingdom

EV charging recruitment in the UK

We recruit across EV charging in the UK. Grid connections are the cost and the delay here, and every operator knows it. What they are less often told is that grid is rarely the hire. Securing the sites and staffing the field service that keeps them running are, and those are the two things a recruiter can actually change.

Those are two completely different hires, and almost nobody is good at both. Running alongside them is a third market that gets talked about far less: the installers putting charge points on houses, in car parks and at workplaces, who are about to have their whole field workforce revalued by a qualification deadline. We work all three.

Clients we have helped

The niches inside the niche

EV charging is not one market

Public charging, depot charging, the software platforms and the hardware manufacturers all hire differently, and people rarely move between them. Whichever one you sit in, the hiring problem next door is not your hiring problem.

Public charging and CPOs: You are hiring grid connection, siting and field service across an estate that is dispersed by design, and so is everyone you are bidding against for the same people.
Bus, truck and depot charging: If you build the charging, the people who genuinely understand megawatt charging sit with a handful of specialist providers, and you already know who they are. If you run the fleet, the expertise you need is one line inside a generalist operations role, so it has no job title to advertise against.
eMSPs, roaming and charging software: You are hiring like a software business, not an energy one, which means you lose people to fintech on salary before you reach offer. The one thing you cannot hire generically is roaming and protocol interoperability.
Charge point manufacturers: Design is not usually where it hurts. Certification, compliance and the units already in the field are, and the gap that keeps reappearing is embedded firmware and after-sales engineering.
Home and domestic installation: You are not competing with other charging businesses for electricians, you are competing with solar and heat pumps for the same qualified trades, and the qualification itself is becoming the constraint rather than the experience.
Fleet and workplace charging: Almost never its own job title, so when you need it you are hiring out of consultancies and specialist installers rather than from a business that looks like yours. The buyer sits in fleet or facilities rather than energy, which changes who the hire has to convince.

Our Approach

How we work here

Recruitment fundamentals travel. Markets do not. The UK puts a band on the face of an advert far more often than anywhere else we work, and charging is no exception. That cuts both ways: a candidate knows what the market pays before you call them, and a band set slightly under it is visible to everyone including your competitors. We have been hiring into UK charging for years, from field service engineers and CAD technicians through construction and site acquisition to product and commercial leadership, and the method flexes to the market every time.

Before you brief anyone

Two questions worth answering first

Hiring from outside the sector means persuading somebody to change industry, and that turns on two things most businesses have never written down.

Why should a good engineer come into EV charging rather than any other part of the transition? And why should they come to you rather than the operator down the road?

Most cannot answer either, because most are offering the same things: a growing market, a good team, interesting work. None of that is a reason to move.

A business that hires on skills alone, without knowing whether the person actually cares about the transition, is usually hiring for the same role again sooner than it planned.

Why Hiring Here Is Different

Why hiring here is different from anywhere else

Grid is the cost. Land and field service are the hires.

Grid connections are the headline problem in UK charging and nobody who operates here needs telling why. The Strategic Charging Infrastructure scheme exists because connecting at motorway sites is currently uncommercial, and Ofgem marked the system operator down on connections reform in September 2026. On a hub site it is the cost and it is the delay. What it usually is not, yet, is the hire. Most operators are absorbing grid work through people they already have, through their ICP, or by waiting, and that is why grid and DNO liaison is only now starting to appear as a job title of its own. It will become one, and on the hub side we would expect it inside the next year. The two constraints you can recruit your way out of today are different, and they are unrelated to each other. Ultra-rapid is growing at nearly 37% a year and every one of those bays needs a site, so the scarce person is a commercial real estate specialist who can secure forecourt and roadside land rather than an engineer. Underneath that sits a field service and installation gap that shows up at operators of every size and every level of funding, which is the opposite of how scarcity usually behaves. A hiring plan built only around the grid headline will miss both.

Source: Ofgem review of NESO performance, 2025/26
Source: Zapmap H1 2026 UK charging statistics

Talent Scarcity

Where the pressure is right now

Site and land acquisition. One operator is currently running the same senior site acquisition role in five UK cities at once. That is not a growth plan, that is a hedge against not filling it anywhere, and the brief asks for five years of commercial real estate experience and a chartered surveying qualification. The people who fit have almost never worked in charging, which is a hiring problem and an EVP problem before it is a search problem.

Field service and installation. The most persistent shortage in UK charging, and the one least affected by who owns the company. When the same engineer role appears through two different intermediaries in adjoining territories at the same band, it has not been filled and the brief usually needs to change.

Post-acquisition integration. Three networks changed hands between February and May 2026. The buyers now need engineering leads who can merge two backend platforms, field service managers inheriting somebody else’s fault log, and commercial leads re-pricing an acquired customer base. That is a different hire to a growth hire and it does not wait.

Certified domestic and workplace installation electricians. From 1 October every person on the van needs the EV award in their own name rather than the firm holding it through one nominated person. Any installer whose field team is only partly qualified loses deployable capacity on that date, and every business in the same position will be looking for the same certified people at the same time. It is the most predictable squeeze in UK charging and almost nobody has planned for it.

Grid and DNO liaison on hub sites. Not urgent everywhere yet, and about to be. The moment an operator has two or three hub sites stuck in the same queue it becomes a named job title, and there is no established pool of people who have done it in charging specifically.

Based on live vacancy activity across the UK charging market. Reviewed 14 September 2026, updated monthly.

Delivery

Work we have done in UK charging

Two recent UK charging engagements.

A charge point operator built from two people up: A UK charge point operator with two people in it took investment from a large corporate and had to become a real company quickly. We built the team: the chief operating officer and operations director, regional sales directors across three territories, the bid director and bid managers under them, contracts, network and technical design management, project managers, quantity surveying and data. Around thirty people now, and winning awards.
Charging engineering inside an energy services business: An energy services business running charging alongside a wider renewables programme needed EV charging engineering it could not reach through its usual channels. We ran those searches alongside the electrical, civil and controls engineering on the rest of the programme.

Market Intelligence

The market right now

6 July 2026

Growth has moved to the rapid end

The UK public network passed 121,171 charge points by the end of June 2026, up 10% year on year. Ultra-rapid units at 150kW and above grew 37% in the same period, against 5.7% for destination charging, so almost all of the growth pressure now sits on hub and forecourt build rather than on the street furniture that makes up most of the installed base.

Source: H1 2026 UK EV charging infrastructure statistics .
6 July 2026

Hubs are the unit of growth

There are now 1,034 charging hubs of eight or more rapid bays in the UK, with 108 of them added in the first half of 2026. A hub is a property transaction, a planning application, a grid connection and a construction programme before it is ever a charger, which is why the hiring around it looks nothing like the hiring around on-street.

Source: H1 2026 UK EV charging infrastructure statistics .
first reports due 14 January 2026

Reliability stopped being aspirational

The 99% reliability standard for rapid networks under the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 reached its first real compliance year in 2026, with the opening reporting period covering 2025 and reports due in January 2026. Enforcement is targeted at repeat under-performers, with fines reaching £10,000 per charge point per breach.

Source: The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 .
9 March 2026

Every installer now needs the qualification in their own name

From 1 October 2026 the updated Electrotechnical Assessment Specification expects every employed person carrying out charge point work, and every qualified supervisor overseeing it, to personally hold an acceptable EV qualification. Holding it at firm level through one nominated person no longer meets the requirement, and a competent person scheme assessment after that date will look for individual awards.

Source: EV charging installation qualifications update .
1 April 2026

The home grant moved to the people without driveways

From 1 April 2026 the chargepoint grant rose from £350 to £500 per socket at 75% of cost, and it now aims at renters, flat owners, residential landlords and households with only on-street parking installing a cross-pavement solution. Homeowners with a driveway have not been eligible since 2022. Roughly four in ten UK households have no off-street parking. Funding runs to 31 March 2027.

Source: Changes to chargepoint grant schemes from 1 April 2026 , Electric vehicle chargepoint grants .
scheme opened 25 March 2026

The money moved to depots

A £170 million Depot Charging Scheme runs from April 2026 to 2030, funding 70% of charge point and civils cost up to £1 million per applicant, with £66 million released across two windows in 2026 alone. Workplace Charging Scheme grants rose from £350 to £500 per socket on 1 April 2026.

Source: Depot Charging Scheme announcement .
June 2025, revised 2026

The motorway fund was rebuilt smaller

The £950 million Rapid Charging Fund was scrapped in June 2025 having issued none of its money in five years. It has been part-replaced by £400 million over five years weighted towards urban and on-street charging, of which £190 million is carved out as the Strategic Charging Infrastructure scheme for motorway sites where a grid connection is currently uncommercial.

Source: Strategic Charging Infrastructure scheme .
February to May 2026

Three networks changed hands in four months

Between February and May 2026 a 1,600 bay public network was sold by its utility parent, a 1,500 point on-street operator went into administration and was bought out of a pre-pack with all 63 staff transferring, and a fleet charging software business was bought out of administration by a utility-owned operator. The buyers are the ones with utility or National Wealth Fund backing, and what they need next is people who can integrate somebody else’s network and somebody else’s software stack quickly.

Source: Be.EV acquires Mer as consolidation continues .

Market intelligence reviewed 14 September 2026.

TalentPilot

We would rather you needed us less

Most agencies are built so that you call them again. The model only works while hiring stays hard for you, which means nobody selling it has much reason to make it easier.

We took the opposite bet, and not only out of principle. A business that hires well on its own stays a client for years and brings us the roles that are genuinely difficult. A business that depends on an agency resents every invoice and leaves the first time somebody undercuts us. The second kind of relationship is worth less and lasts less long.

So we built TalentPilot. Twenty-one tools across planning, attracting, hiring and keeping people: map the roles before they become urgent, see where the people actually are, write the advert properly, run a consistent interview, and know which of your new starters is at risk before they resign.

And one thing almost nobody has. Every week, the real reasons candidates said no. Not a summary. The actual objections: the money, the location, the counter-offer, the part of the role that put them off. Most businesses never find out, which is why they keep making the same hire the same way.

Everything on this page is one market on one date. Our clients see their own, continuously.

What is left for us is the work that genuinely needs a search. That is the part we are good at, and the part worth paying for.

See how TalentPilot works

How a search runs

You see it as we see it

Before we start: The brief and the target companies are agreed in writing. You know which businesses we are approaching and which we are not, before anyone is contacted.
Every week: The outreach, the response levels, where each person sits in the process, and the reasons anyone said no. The money, the location, the counter-offer, the part of the role that put them off.
When it stalls: You hear it from us. A search that has gone quiet is a conversation about the brief, not a report we delay until you ask.

What happens when you get in touch

A first call is a conversation about your hiring plan. Half an hour, with the consultant who runs this market for us.

We will tell you what we are seeing in your part of it: where the difficulty sits, which roles are moving and what people are actually being paid. You get that whether you decide to work with us or not.

If there is something we can help with, we will say what it would take and roughly how long. If there isn't, we will say so and point you at whoever is better placed.

No slide deck, no pitch, and nobody will chase you afterwards.

For Employers

Build the team that delivers.

Book a Discovery Call

For Candidates

Find your place in the transition.

Explore Open Roles

If you work in this market

What we are seeing from the other side

The same searches, read from the candidate side.

Field service engineers: You are the most fought-over people in UK charging and the published bands do not always show it. Rates move quickly and the difference between operators on call-out, van, tools and travel is often worth more than the headline salary.
Domestic and workplace installers: Hold the EV qualification in your own name and you are worth materially more from 1 October than you were in September, because it stops being something your employer can hold on your behalf. If you do not hold it yet, ask who is paying for it before you accept anything.
Property and site acquisition: If you have secured commercial or roadside sites in any sector, charging wants you and will usually pay to bring you across. Almost nobody hiring expects sector experience, because there is barely any to hire.
People inside an acquired business: Three networks changed owner this year. If yours was one, you are worth more to the acquirer than the org chart currently says, because you know the estate and the faults nobody has documented.
Where it leads: Field service into commissioning leadership, project delivery into country or regional management, and site acquisition into development directorship. The market is young enough that the route up is shorter than in most sectors.

Questions

Clear answers for the next step.

What EV charging roles do you recruit for in the UK?

Site and land acquisition, construction and project management, grid and DNO liaison, field service and installation engineering, domestic and workplace installation, network operations, product and software, and commercial leadership up to managing director. We work public charging, depot and fleet, and the domestic and workplace installer market, and we work the whole chart rather than one level of it.

Is the grid the main problem for UK charging projects?

It is the biggest cost and the longest delay on a hub site, and no operator needs telling that. It is rarely the hire, though. Most are absorbing grid work through people they already have or through their ICP, so the roles that are genuinely hard to fill right now are site acquisition and field service. We would expect dedicated grid and DNO liaison roles to become standard on the hub side inside the next year.

How long should a UK charging hire take?

A straightforward engineering hire here closes in four to six weeks. Past seven, the brief is usually the problem rather than the market, and the right response is to revisit the person spec rather than widen the search.

Do you cover field service and installation as well as leadership?

Yes, and on the same desk. A charging operator needs both, they compete for attention internally, and an agency that only covers one end of it will quietly push you towards the end it can fill.

Do you work with domestic and workplace installation businesses?

Yes, and it is a genuinely different market from public charging rather than a smaller version of it. You are competing for electricians against solar and heat pumps, the grant money has moved to renters, flat owners and households without a driveway, and from 1 October every person carrying out the work needs the EV qualification in their own name rather than the firm holding it for them.

Where in the UK do you recruit?

Everywhere the work is. Site acquisition and product roles concentrate in London, land acquisition spreads across the regional cities by design, and field service and installation is the most geographically spread hiring in the sector.