1. The ICIMS July data shows job openings are up 19% year over year while hiring has stayed flat for three consecutive months. You described it as the market “making sharper bets” rather than hitting the brakes. What does a market making sharper bets look like on the ground for a recruiting team?
“Managers are being incredibly selective right now, and there’s a false narrative fueling part of that. They hear ‘there are tons of people looking for work’ and they think they have all the time in the world to pick. But that’s not the bigger story. The bigger story is that hiring managers are stress-testing the role itself before they ever stress-test a candidate. Do I actually need this seat? And if I do, is this person aligned with what I need today and what I’m going to need twelve months from now? That’s what sharper bets look like. It’s more deliberate hiring than it is just ‘slow hiring.’”
2. ICIMS High Volume Hiring just moved from a product concept to generally available. With application volume running below last year’s baseline, what does a recruiting team in a frontline industry need right now that they weren’t asking for two years ago?
“Candidate expectations have lapped most organizations’ ability to keep up. Think about it this way: you can go on Amazon right now, search for a high-ticket item like a computer monitor, read the reviews, place the order and you’re done in under 5 minutes. If your application process takes 10 minutes, you have a serious problem. And the data backs that up. Our Frontline Hiring Report last year showed 60% of candidates abandon an application, and the number 1 reason is length. So, step 1 for any frontline recruiting team is brutally honest: compare your application experience to the consumer experiences your candidates already have. Find the friction, cut what doesn’t need to be there and streamline what’s left. That’s exactly why we built High Volume Hiring the way we did. It’s a conversational experience. The candidate still gives you everything you need, but it feels like a 2-minute text exchange, not a 10-minute form. And when application volume is declining, you cannot afford to lose people to a process they won’t finish.”
3. Candidate drop-off is one of the specific problems this solution targets. From your vantage point, at what point in the process are frontline candidates most likely to walk away, and why has that been hard to fix?
“Answered above but let me know if you have any follow-up questions.”
4. The July report found that employers are competing for a shrinking pool of active candidates while posting more roles. That sounds like a funnel problem. But is it something deeper going on about how frontline workers are choosing to engage with the job market right now?
“I’d actually push back on framing this as a ‘funnel problem’ or even a worker engagement problem. What the data is showing me is an employer reallocation story. The narrative says AI is taking jobs, but the data doesn’t really support that. What’s more likely happening is organizations are shifting capital away from certain types of roles and into AI infrastructure. And that shows up in the postings. Companies are putting up new roles built around capabilities they’ll need in the next twelve to eighteen months while they’re still sorting through the older requisitions that were already live. So, the pool looks like it’s shrinking, and postings look like they’re growing, but underneath that, it’s a portfolio being restructured. Now, on the frontline side, that story is different. Frontline hiring is still powering ahead. Those roles aren’t getting restructured or replaced by AI. They’re getting harder to fill because the candidate experience and the speed expectations haven’t kept pace, which goes back to everything we just talked about.”
5. ICIMS data shows that job seekers believe AI is reducing the number of entry-level roles available. Meanwhile, high-volume hiring is becoming AI-driven. How do you think about that tension and how should organizations be talking about it with the candidates they’re trying to hire?
“I think the mistake is treating these as the same conversation, because they’re not. On one side, you have candidate perception that AI is eliminating entry-level jobs. And there’s some truth to it. Organizations are reallocating capital from those roles into AI infrastructure. But they’re doing it at real risk, and here’s why. The idea that AI can just replace entry-level work is shortsighted. Anyone working with AI right now knows the output still needs significant human oversight. And more importantly, you’re gutting the incoming class of future managers. Where do your directors come from in 5 years if nobody got the entry-level reps in today? That’s a workforce planning problem companies aren’t talking about enough. Now, using AI in the recruiting process itself is a completely different issue. That’s about how you engage candidates, not whether the roles exist. But here’s where the two connect: if candidates already believe AI is shrinking their opportunities, and then the application process feels like they’re talking to a machine with no human on the other end, you’ve confirmed their worst fear. You have to keep the human visible in recruiting. Changing jobs is a human process. It needs human insight and human oversight.”
6. You’ve spent twenty years on the practitioner side before moving into the insights world. When you look at ICIMS High Volume Hiring as someone who has run large recruiting operations, what’s the thing in this product that you wish you’d had access to ten years ago?
“The experience, without question. I spent years watching high-volume candidates get forced through a process that was designed for knowledge workers. Upload your resume, re-enter half of it into a form, then navigate an application flow that assumes you’re sitting at a desk with twenty minutes to spare. That’s not how frontline candidates operate. So, the thing I would have wanted most is what we built: a conversational application. The candidate isn’t filling out a form, they’re having an exchange. And here’s the piece that doesn’t get talked about enough. A lot of frontline candidates don’t have a polished resume. That shouldn’t disqualify them. A conversational process lets them build a strong application in the moment and actually compete for the role. The second thing, and this is the data nerd in me, is visibility. When I was running high-volume operations, I was stitching together reports from 3 different systems to figure out where candidates were falling out of the process. Having conversion rates, time-in-stage and application volume in one place so I can walk into a meeting and say, ‘here’s exactly where we’re losing people and here’s what it’s costing us’ would have changed how I operated.”
7. You’ve written two books on recruiting and spent years living inside workforce data. When you look at a stat like application volume being below baseline for the better part of a year, what’s the story behind the number that a headline doesn’t capture?
“This is where you have to go past the headline and sit with the data for a minute. The participation rate just dropped to 61.5% in June. Long-term unemployment, people who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, is at 1.9 million and up 300,000 over the year. Over a quarter of everyone who is unemployed right now has been unemployed for more than 6 months. And there are 6 million people who say they want a job but are not actively looking. That last number is the one that keeps me up at night.
Because here’s the story the headline misses. We’ve been hearing for years that candidates are frustrated with the process. They apply, they hear nothing, they apply again, they hear nothing. At some point, rational people stop doing things that don’t produce results. And the data is starting to look like that’s exactly what’s happening. You have a participation rate sliding, long-term unemployment climbing, and millions of people who want to work but have stopped raising their hand. That’s a labor market that quietly trains people to disengage.
And the unemployment rate sitting in this narrow 4.2 to 4.5% band for almost a year makes it look stable on the surface. The headline says ‘steady.’ The data underneath says ‘erosion.’ The people who are unemployed are staying unemployed longer, and the people who are dropping out aren’t showing up in the unemployment number at all. So, the composition is shifting even while the top line holds still.
Now, does that mean every candidate who stopped applying did it because they got ghosted? No. There are demographic shifts, there’s caregiving, there’s people moving into gig work that doesn’t show up the same way. But the candidate experience piece is a real accelerant. If you’ve made applying to your organization feel like shouting into a void, you’re contributing to this problem whether you see it in your own data or not.”
8. For a Head of Talent or CHRO reading this who knows their process has inefficiencies but hasn’t fixed them yet, what’s the honest cost of waiting another quarter?
“I’m going to be direct because I think the moment calls for it. Every data point we’ve talked about today is moving in the same direction, and none of them are moving in your favor.
The participation rate is at 61.5% and sliding. Long-term unemployment is up to almost 300,000 over the year. 6 million people say they want a job and have stopped looking for one. Application volume is below baseline. And we know from our own data that 60% of candidates who start an application don’t finish it.
So, here’s the math on waiting another quarter. That shrinking candidate pool you’re already competing over gets smaller. The candidates who are still actively looking get more selective about where they spend their time, and if your process takes 10 minutes when your competitor takes 2, you lose. The managers inside your organization who are already being more deliberate about which roles to fill are now waiting longer to fill them because the top of your funnel is leaking. And every quarter you don’t hire entry-level talent is another quarter you’re not building the bench that becomes your management team in 3 to 5 years.
The cost of waiting isn’t just an open req. It’s compound interest working against you. A bad process in a market with abundant candidates is an inconvenience. A bad process in a market where candidates are actively disengaging is an existential problem. And the data says we are in the second market right now.
If you’re a CHRO reading this and you know your process has friction, the question stopped being ‘should we fix it’ about 2 quarters ago. The question now is how much of your future talent pipeline are you willing to lose while you’re still debating it.”
About Trent Cotton:
Trent Cotton is the Head of Talent Insights at ICIMS, a leading enterprise talent acquisition platform, where he empowers global organizations with data-driven strategies to hire smarter and faster. With over 20 years of experience as an HR and Talent executive, Trent is known for translating complex workforce trends into clear, actionable insights that drive business results.
He is the author of High Performance Recruiting and Sprint Recruiting, providing practical frameworks for transforming recruiting into a high-impact function. Passionate about bridging data with human decision-making, Trent continues to challenge traditional recruiting models and champion innovative approaches that meet the demands of today’s talent economy. He is named on HR Executive’s 2026 Top 100 HR Tech Influencers list, which honors the voices shaping workforce technology and the future of HR.
