How UK Screen Crews Actually Get Hired — and What That's Costing the Industry
- May 23, 2025
The UK’s film and high-end television (HETV) production sector has had an extraordinary few years. Combined production spend rose from £3.4 billion in 2017 to £5.64 billion in 2021 — a 63% increase — and is forecast by industry researchers to reach between £7.07 billion and £7.66 billion by 2025. New soundstages are opening in Cardiff, Belfast, Leeds, Liverpool and Leith. Streaming platforms are commissioning at a pace unheard of five years ago.
Almost none of that growth is matched by a modern hiring process.
According to the BFI’s 2022 Skills Review — commissioned by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and delivered through consultation with crew, department heads, trade unions and national screen agencies — production jobs in the UK are still “rarely widely advertised,” and recruitment continues to rely heavily on word of mouth. The review’s consultations turned up a recruitment culture that looks more like a village network than an industry undergoing a global investment boom.
An industry that hires through private chats
The review is unusually direct about the mechanics of hiring on a production. One art department coordinator interviewed for the study put it plainly: WhatsApp crew threads are one of the main channels some heads of department use to find people, alongside private social media groups. These channels are, by design, exclusive — you cannot apply to a WhatsApp group you don’t know exists, and you cannot be added to one unless someone already inside it vouches for you.
The review also documents the sharper edge of this system: a trade union officer told researchers that heads of department retain considerable personal discretion over hiring, discretion that “can still” be used in ways that amount to nepotism, and called for fairer, more transparent recruitment practices.
Some more formal channels exist. Local film offices maintain crew lists, and larger broadcasters — the BBC in particular — advertise certain long-running production roles openly. Commercial job boards for creative freelancers also operate in the market. But the BFI’s own review notes that even the film-office route “can still retain some level of exclusivity,” and that most commercial platforms function as directories rather than as tools that actively vet, filter or manage a hiring process.
Why word of mouth persists
The review is careful not to frame this purely as a culture problem. It identifies a structural cause: timing. A returning drama series might be commissioned six to nine months before shooting starts, but even that runway rarely leaves enough time for an open, formally advertised recruitment process once prep time is accounted for. Heads of department are themselves usually freelancers, juggling their own workload, with no time to sift applications or run interviews for every role on a crew list that can run into the hundreds. Under that pressure, hiring managers default to people they already know, trust, or have had recommended to them by someone they trust.
The BFI review calls this what it is: a system that is “opaque,” that “create[s] barriers for new entrants,” and that can even hold back experienced crew trying to move into a different role or type of production.
What informal hiring costs the industry
This is not simply a fairness issue, although the review treats fairness as central. Informal, network-based hiring has three compounding effects the research identifies directly:
It narrows the talent pool at exactly the wrong moment. The same review that documents these hiring practices also models the scale of the UK’s coming skills shortage: separate research commissioned alongside the review — the Nordicity/Saffery Champness labour market forecast — estimates that the sector will need between 15,130 and 20,770 additional full-time equivalent crew by 2025, on top of an existing 2021 base of 52,300. A recruitment system that only reaches people already inside existing networks structurally excludes a large share of the labour supply the industry says it urgently needs.
It correlates with reduced diversity of background. The BFI review references 2020 research finding that 53% of people working in UK screen industries came from a privileged socioeconomic background, against 25% from a working-class background — compared with a roughly even 38%/38% split across the UK workforce as a whole. Closed, referral-based hiring is one of the mechanisms researchers point to in explaining that gap.
It contributes to under-preparedness on set. With shortages already biting, the review notes that productions are increasingly promoting people early, or hiring people without the experience the role calls for, simply because the usual channels haven’t surfaced anyone better — a pattern the review links directly to rising stress levels and safety concerns on productions.
What the BFI is recommending
The review’s own second headline recommendation, alongside investment in training, is “a more formalised approach to hiring, workplace management and professional development.” Concretely, the BFI has committed National Lottery funding to two initiatives that speak directly to this: a pilot service to map crew availability and forecast shortages by role and region, and a programme to build standard job description templates — something the industry has historically lacked — so that recruitment can be run against a defined set of responsibilities and competencies rather than “an over reliance on previous credits,” in the review’s words.
The direction of travel identified by the BFI’s own research is clear: an industry moving from informal, closed, relationship-based hiring toward something more structured, more visible, and open to a wider pool of qualified people — without losing the speed that fast-moving production schedules require.
This analysis draws on the BFI Skills Review 2022 and the accompanying Nordicity/Saffery Champness labour market research. It reflects the industry evidence base that has shaped Ripple One’s approach to talent discovery in the UK screen sector.