Should your NHS trust wait for the Future Workforce Solution?

Most NHS trusts won't see the Future NHS Workforce Solution until 2028 at the earliest, but their hiring can't wait that long.

That's the tension behind a question we hear on almost every NHS call this year: should we hold off changing our recruitment system until the national platform arrives that replaces ESR? It's a fair question and it deserves a straight answer, built on what has actually been published rather than what people hope will be in it.

What is the NHS Future Workforce Solution?

It's the national platform replacing the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). In October 2025 the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) awarded Infosys a 15 year contract worth £1.2bn (£1.4bn including VAT) to build it. ESR holds the records of and pays around 1.9 million NHS staff in England and Wales, processing £55bn of payroll a year.

This is a welcome piece of work. ESR runs on ageing technology and its support ends in 2035. A single connected platform across the employment lifecycle is a sensible ambition and we'd like to see it succeed.

Will it include recruitment?

Yes. Talent acquisition is one of seven functional domains and one of three that are genuinely new, because ESR has never handled recruitment. The published scope covers vacancy management, sourcing and job marketing, vacancy posting, candidate assessment, applicant tracking, onboarding and metrics.

What hasn't been published is every element that decides whether a recruitment system actually works in a busy trust. How configurable it will be and who gets to configure it. Whether there's a careers site. How application forms, scoring and shortlisting will work. Accessibility standards. WRES, WDES and time to hire reporting. DBS, right to work and occupational health integrations. And the future of NHS Jobs.

None of that is a criticism - design work is still ongoing with more than 400 people involved and no programme at this stage could be expected to have those answers. But it does mean that anyone describing the recruitment module in detail today is guessing, and that includes us.

When will your trust get it?

Probably later than most people assume. NHSBSA's published timeline for the platform as a whole runs like this:

• Through 2026: design workshops and testing with around 30 organisations, with no product in any trust
• Q3 2027: early adopters deploy, covering around 10% of the NHS workforce
• Q1 2028 to Q1 2030: full deployment in four waves
• 2035: ESR support ends

No separate date has been published for the recruitment element, which is an optional module. So even an early adopter has no guarantee that recruitment will arrive alongside the HR and payroll features.

So for most trusts that probably means two to four years of hiring using whatever system they use today.

The targets won't wait for your wave

The pressure is on now, however. NHS England's time to hire target is 8 weeks, yet trusts report an average of 14+ weeks. Trusts are also being asked to cut agency spending by 30% and bank costs by 10%.

Those targets don't pause while a national programme works through design. So the real question shouldn't be "should we wait?" The question should be: can you afford to wait for an optional recruitment module when you need cost reductions and efficiency gains today?

The gap is several thousand appointments

It's the number that tends to change the conversation. A trust hiring 1,000 people a year that is three years from its wave will make 3,000 appointments on its current system before anything changes. At 2,000 hires a year and four years out, it's 8,000.

If your current process already struggles with slow time to hire, heavy admin or candidates dropping out between offer and start date, every one of those appointments carries that cost - and as an NHS trust, a lack of efficiency can be the difference between life and death for patients. 

There's a practical point too: if your current contract ends before your wave arrives - waiting is not an option.

Will buying now mean wasted investment later?

Not if you get two things right.

The first is payback. If the new system pays for itself before the national platform reaches you, the investment has already earned its keep. Try our ATS ROI calculator which will give you figures for your own trust in a few minutes.

The second is what moves with you. A documented recruitment process, accurate structured data and hiring managers trained in a modern digital process are all part of NHSBSA's own foundational readiness pillars. They're not written off when the NHS Future Workforce Solution arrives, but make you better prepared when it does.

What trusts are getting today

Jobtrain is an applicant tracking and onboarding platform built for the NHS and integrated with NHS Jobs, ESR and the tools your teams already rely on. We were the first ATS other than NHS Jobs to offer a real-time ESR integration and more than 30 NHS organisations use Jobtrain, including the whole of NHS Scotland.

Across these organisations we see an average time to hire of 30 days, a 50% reduction in recruitment admin, a 90% cut in frontline manager screening time and an average 35% reduction in agency use and spend. WRES, WDES and NHS England time to hire reports are also automated. For the average trust, that equates to around £3.85m a year. 

Jay Patel, Strategic Resourcing Manager at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, describes it as "true transformation happening in real time".

A quick note for Scottish health boards: the Future NHS Workforce Solution replaces ESR, which covers England and Wales only. NHS Scotland has no migration wave, so none of this affects your recruitment decisions.

Your next step

Ask NHSBSA two questions this week: which wave is your trust in and when does recruitment specifically arrive?

Input your annual hiring volume into our ROI calculator to see what the interim years are worth. If the numbers are indicating to act now, book 20 minutes with us and we'll help you build the business case.

Sources: NHSBSA Future NHS Workforce Solution Transformation Programme; Find a Tender award notice 2025/S 000-071542; NHSBSA delivery phase briefing pack, February 2026; NHS England Provider Workforce Returns; Jobtrain, The Future Workforce Solution. Correct as at October 2026.