Hiring: harder but different
Companies say hiring didn’t get easier in 2025 and the labour market now looks selective rather than abundant, with layoffs spiking in Q1 and employers increasingly asking for AI skills. Surveys and reports show 90% of companies felt hiring didn’t improve, Q1 brought a broad layoff surge, and job postings requiring AI capabilities climbed dramatically — one report cited a 555% rise in two years (Inc., (intellizence.com), El Confidencial). The market is therefore sorting for candidates who combine core engineering fundamentals with practical AI tool fluency and operational awareness.
A lot of companies spent 2025 saying they had fewer openings, and then spent the same year saying hiring still felt harder than expected. In GoodTime’s 2026 Hiring Insights Report, 90% of 500 talent acquisition leaders said hiring did not get easier in 2025, and 60% said time-to-hire got longer. (inc.com) That sounds backwards until you look at what employers were actually doing. They were not hiring broadly across whole teams; they were holding headcount tight and getting pickier about the few roles they still wanted to fill. (inc.com, hiringlab.org) Indeed’s Hiring Lab put numbers on that split in January 2026. Total United States job postings at the end of 2025 were only about 6% above their February 1, 2020 baseline, but postings mentioning artificial intelligence had jumped more than 130% over the same period. (hiringlab.org) The concentration is even sharper inside white-collar work. Indeed said nearly 45% of data and analytics postings contained artificial-intelligence terms by December 2025, compared with about 15% in marketing and 9% in human resources. (hiringlab.org) So the labor market stopped looking like a crowded supermarket and started looking like airport security. Fewer people are moving, fewer jobs are open, and the jobs that do open come with a longer checklist. (hiringlab.org, inc.com) Then came the other half of the picture in early 2026: layoffs accelerated. Intellizence said on April 8, 2026 that more than 1,621 companies had announced mass layoffs since January 1, with cuts spanning technology, banking, retail, manufacturing, logistics, media, and education. (intellizence.com) Its tracker lists the cuts as broad rather than isolated. The examples include Amazon with 16,000 jobs in January, United Parcel Service with 30,000 in January, Meta with 1,000 in January and 16,000 in March, Volkswagen with 50,000 in March, and Oracle with 30,000 in April. (intellizence.com) That mix tells you this is not just a technology-sector story. Companies in very different industries are trimming old plans at the same time they keep searching for people who can work with new tools, especially artificial-intelligence systems. (intellizence.com, hiringlab.org) The pay data points the same way. PwC’s 2025 Global Artificial Intelligence Jobs Barometer, based on nearly a billion job ads, said jobs requiring artificial-intelligence skills carried an average 56% wage premium in 2024, up from 25% a year earlier. (pwc.com) Spanish newspaper El Confidencial, citing labor-market reporting on April 10, 2026, said job offers requiring artificial-intelligence handling had risen 555% in two years. That is the cleanest way to read the market right now: companies are cutting in bulk and shopping in narrow categories. (elconfidencial.com) For candidates, that means the winning profile is less “pure specialist” and more “useful on Monday morning.” Employers still want core skills like software engineering, analysis, sales, or operations, but they increasingly want those skills bundled with prompt writing, workflow automation, model evaluation, and enough judgment to know when an artificial-intelligence output is wrong. (hiringlab.org, pwc.com, bcg.com) That is why hiring feels harder even after a year of slower recruiting. The market did not become easier; it became narrower, more selective, and much more specific about what “qualified” now means. (inc.com, intellizence.com, hiringlab.org)
