If you’ve been hiring in the past year and felt whiplash reading labor market headlines, Joveo’s latest data explains why. According to the company’s newly released Recruiting Benchmarks Report 2026, the U.S. job market didn’t cool in 2025—it fractured.
Drawing on millions of job postings and applications, the report paints a picture of two labor markets running in parallel. In one, recruiters were buried under unprecedented volumes of applicants. In the other, critical roles remained stubbornly hard to fill, with no meaningful increase in qualified candidates. The result: talent acquisition teams facing radically different realities depending on the jobs they were hiring for.
“Most recruiting benchmarks still describe the labor market as a single story. That’s no longer true,” said Kshitij Jain (KJ), Founder and CEO of Joveo. “Our data shows two labor markets operating at the same time—excess volume in some roles, real scarcity in others.”
For HR and TA leaders, the message is clear: volume is no longer a reliable signal of progress.
The Applicant Avalanche: When More Is Too Much
One of the most striking findings in the report is what Joveo calls the “Applicant Avalanche.” Between November 2022 and November 2025, applicant volume in certain occupations grew by as much as 9x.
On paper, that sounds like a recruiter’s dream. In practice, it became a liability.
White-collar roles—particularly in tech and corporate functions—saw applicant numbers explode. Recruiters were suddenly facing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications per role. Traditional hiring funnels, designed for far lower volumes, simply couldn’t cope.
“It’s become a consensus view amongst talent acquisition professionals that the surge in job applicant volume is increasing time to hire,” said Hung Lee, Curator of Recruiting Brainfood. “The traditional hiring funnel in many cases can no longer operate under the volume of applications which are now standard per job post.”
Instead of speeding up hiring, excess volume slowed it down.
Volume Isn’t Progress—and Sometimes It’s the Problem
One of the report’s most counterintuitive conclusions is that more applicants did not make hiring easier.
Manual screening emerged as the dominant bottleneck. Faced with overwhelming queues, recruiters often reviewed only the first wave of applications, hired from that subset, and never reached strong candidates buried deeper in the pile.
This created a paradox: employers were drowning in applicants while simultaneously missing top talent.
In effect, applicant volume became noise. Without automation, prioritization, or smarter screening, quantity worked against quality. For many teams, time-to-hire increased—not because talent was scarce, but because attention was.
A Labor Market Split Down the Middle
While some roles experienced applicant overload, others saw no relief at all.
The report highlights a sharp divide:
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Applicant-flooded roles: Many white-collar and remote-friendly jobs attracted far more candidates than recruiters could reasonably evaluate.
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Supply-constrained roles: Location-bound, licensed, or credentialed jobs—such as healthcare, skilled trades, and regulated professions—remained difficult to fill.
In these roles, macroeconomic cooling didn’t create new supply. Credentials, geography, and licensing requirements continued to limit candidate pools, resulting in long time-to-fill windows regardless of broader labor trends.
Joveo’s data suggests these shortages are structural, not cyclical. In other words, waiting for the market to “loosen” isn’t a strategy.
Experience Inflation Becomes a New Filter
Faced with overwhelming applicant volume, employers responded by raising the bar.
In applicant-heavy roles, experience requirements quietly increased, effectively acting as a blunt filtering mechanism. According to the report, tech job postings asking for five or more years of experience rose from 37% to 42% over the period studied.
This shift had cascading effects:
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Entry-level pathways narrowed, reducing opportunities for early-career talent.
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Employer costs increased, as more experienced candidates command higher compensation.
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Long-term talent pipelines weakened, as fewer candidates were given the chance to grow into roles.
What looks like selectivity is, in many cases, a workaround for broken screening processes.
Two Markets, One Strategy Problem
One of the report’s most important implications is strategic: a single recruiting playbook no longer works.
In applicant-flooded roles, the challenge isn’t attraction—it’s triage. In supply-constrained roles, attraction still matters, but so do location strategy, credential pipelines, and long-term workforce planning.
Yet many TA teams continue to deploy the same tools, budgets, and workflows across both realities. Joveo argues this leads to misallocation—over-investing where volume is already excessive, and under-serving roles where scarcity persists.
The result is frustration on both sides of the hiring equation.
Why Manual Screening Is Breaking Hiring
Across the data, one issue keeps resurfacing: manual screening doesn’t scale.
Applicant tracking systems were never designed to handle 9x increases in volume. Recruiters, under pressure to move quickly, default to shortcuts—early applicants, keyword filters, or rigid experience thresholds.
These practices don’t just slow hiring; they distort it. Strong candidates are missed. Bias risks increase. And hiring outcomes become less predictable.
The report implicitly makes the case for AI-led recruitment marketing and screening, not as a nice-to-have, but as a structural necessity in high-volume roles.
The Data Behind the Report
The Recruiting Benchmarks 2026 Report draws on Joveo’s Interactive Insights platform, supplemented by data from TalentNeuron, Talroo, and JobGet. It analyzes activity across 16 major occupations in all U.S. states, representing millions of job postings and applications.
This breadth allows Joveo to move beyond anecdotes and identify patterns that cut across industries, geographies, and role types.
Importantly, the report doesn’t just measure volume—it connects applicant behavior to recruiter outcomes, revealing where systems break down.
What Talent Leaders Should Take Away
For HR and TA leaders, the report offers several clear takeaways:
First, stop treating the labor market as a monolith. Hiring conditions vary dramatically by role, and strategy must follow reality—not headlines.
Second, applicant volume is no longer a reliable KPI. Without intelligent prioritization, more applicants can actively harm hiring outcomes.
Third, experience inflation is a warning sign. When requirements creep up, it often signals process failure rather than genuine business need.
Finally, structural shortages won’t solve themselves. Licensed, location-bound roles require long-term investment, not short-term optimization.
The Bigger Picture: Rethinking the Hiring Funnel
Joveo’s findings point to a deeper shift underway in talent acquisition. The classic funnel—post job, collect applicants, screen manually, hire—was built for a different era.
In 2025, that model cracked under pressure.
The next phase of recruiting will likely be defined by segmentation, automation, and precision—treating different roles with different strategies, and using technology to separate signal from noise.
As Jain puts it, the goal isn’t more applicants. It’s the right ones, surfaced at the right time.
For organizations still measuring success by volume alone, the Recruiting Benchmarks 2026 Report is a wake-up call.
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