Editor’s note: The article below is an excerpt from GoodTime’s 2026 Hiring Insights Report. The entire report is available to view online for free here.

Enterprise hiring teams entered 2026 facing sustained pressure, and little margin for error. Despite having broader access to technology, data, and AI than smaller organizations, large employers continue to struggle with execution at scale.

TA leaders at large-scale organizations operate in an environment where small inefficiencies compound quickly. Scheduling complexity, interviewer availability, layered decision-making, and fragmented communication don’t just slow hiring—they destabilize it. As a result, enterprise teams feel the impact of rising time-to-hire, candidate drop-off, and recruiter workload more acutely than most.

At the same time, the enterprise risk profile is changing. Candidate fraud and misrepresentation are emerging as serious concerns, while candidate expectations for speed, flexibility, and transparency continue to rise. In this environment, process discipline matters as much as talent strategy.

The data shows a growing divide among enterprise organizations. Teams that standardize workflows, modernize scheduling, centralize communication, and deploy AI as hiring infrastructure (not just automation) are better positioned to keep pace. Those that rely on manual coordination and fragmented systems are falling further behind.

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Challenges and bottlenecks at enterprise scale

Enterprise hiring teams face many of the same challenges as the broader market—but scale magnifies their impact.

The data shows that enterprise strain is driven first by workload and volume, not a single talent constraint. Retaining top talent and unmanageable recruiter workload are the most cited challenges, highlighting how difficult it has become for large teams to sustain performance under constant hiring pressure. An overwhelming number of applicants and limitations of current hiring technology follow closely, signaling systems that are struggling to keep up with demand.

Execution challenges further compound the issue. Candidates with multiple offers, insufficiently trained hiring managers and interviewers, and new-hire no-shows all rank among the top enterprise obstacles—pointing to breakdowns in consistency and follow-through at scale.

Skills misalignment and candidate drop-off remain persistent concerns, particularly as fraudulent resumes created with AI make it harder to assess true capability across high-volume pipelines. The appearance of fake or fraudulent candidates among the top challenges adds yet another layer of risk for already overextended enterprise teams.

Taken together, the picture is clear: enterprise hiring challenges are systemic and operational, driven by volume, workload, and execution strain rather than talent scarcity alone.

“The reality is that, in the age of AI, the resume and application is going to give significantly less signal on a candidate’s capability. That means putting more weight on work-sample–style assessments, scenario walkthroughs, and live problem-solving that reveals how someone thinks, not how well they can prompt AI.”
-Becky McCullough, VP, Talent Acquisition & Mobility, HubSpot

Time-to-hire trends: scale compounds delay

Time-to-hire remains one of the most pressing issues for enterprise TA teams.

A majority of enterprise leaders report that time-to-hire increased over the past year, while only a small minority managed to reduce it. While this trend mirrors the broader market, its consequences are amplified at enterprise scale—where slow hiring directly impacts productivity, revenue, and workforce planning.

Complex approval structures, interviewer scarcity, and manual scheduling workflows all contribute to longer cycles. As timelines stretch, enterprise teams face higher candidate drop-off rates and increased competition from faster-moving employers.

The takeaway is clear: enterprise hiring speed is constrained by systems, not effort. Without structural fixes, incremental changes will not reverse the trend.

Candidate experience pressures intensify

Enterprise leaders report that the hiring landscape has become more demanding, more competitive, and more operationally complex over the past year.

The most widely felt change is recruitment team turnover, with enterprise leaders citing its impact on their ability to manage candidate flow. At the same time, growing candidate demands have increased the number of touchpoints required throughout the hiring process, making consistency harder to maintain at scale.

Relationship-building has also taken on greater importance. Enterprise leaders increasingly emphasize the need to create meaningful connections with candidates and to connect faster, as slow or fragmented engagement raises the risk of losing candidates to competing employers. Competition remains intense, with many leaders reporting increased demand for talent. At the same time, others note growing talent availability, illustrating a fragmented market where volume may increase, but speed and clarity still determine outcomes.

Finally, a rising candidate drop-off rate reinforces the stakes. As processes grow longer or less transparent, candidates disengage more quickly, putting additional pressure on already stretched enterprise teams.

Taken together, the data shows that enterprise candidate experience is now defined by execution under pressure. Managing candidate flow, maintaining engagement across more touchpoints, and moving quickly have become essential to competing at scale.

AI and automation adoption: ubiquitous, but uneven

AI and automation are widely used across enterprise TA teams, but adoption is uneven by task.

Analytics and reporting lead all enterprise AI use cases, followed by writing job descriptions and interview scheduling. These top applications reflect where enterprise teams are seeing the most immediate value: visibility into hiring performance and relief from high-friction, repeatable work.

Adoption drops off across more candidate-facing and judgment-heavy tasks. Conversational AI, resume screening, candidate sourcing, and drafting candidate communications are used by fewer teams, suggesting a more cautious approach to automating direct candidate interaction.

Overall, the data shows that enterprise teams are applying AI broadly—but prioritizing internal efficiency and insight over front-of-funnel automation

Scheduling presents the biggest opportunity for improvement

Scheduling remains the single largest operational burden in enterprise hiring.

Across the market, recruiters spend a substantial share of their time coordinating interviews. For enterprise teams, this burden is intensified by:

• Larger interviewer pools
• Cross-functional scheduling dependencies
• Higher frequency of cancellations and reschedules

Manual scheduling workflows don’t just slow enterprise hiring—they introduce instability, consume recruiter capacity, and degrade the candidate experience.

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2026 outlook: expected disruptors for enterprise teams

Enterprise TA leaders expect disruption in 2026 to be driven primarily by execution and evaluation challenges, not sourcing alone.

The most anticipated issue is inefficient or untrained hiring managers and interviewers, cited more often than any other disruptor. This points to growing strain on interview quality, interviewer readiness, and decision consistency at enterprise scale.

Close behind is candidate fraud, including AI-generated or misrepresented qualifications. For large organizations with high hiring volume, this introduces new complexity into screening and verification and raises both operational and reputational risk.

Several additional disruptors cluster closely together, including unrealistic compensation expectations, unmanageable recruiter workload, and changes in company hiring policies. These pressures reflect both external market dynamics and internal complexity that enterprise teams must navigate simultaneously.

Notably, traditional concerns like lack of qualified candidates and technology limitations remain present but rank lower than people- and process-related challenges. Candidate drop-off and difficulties adapting interview processes also persist, reinforcing how fragile execution becomes as systems scale.

Overall, the chart shows that enterprise hiring risk in 2026 is less about access to talent and more about managing people, process, and signal quality under pressure.

2026 priorities and tech investment plans

Enterprise hiring priorities for 2026 are tightly centered on execution and efficiency.

The top focus areas reflect a clear desire to make hiring systems work better at scale. Optimizing automation and improving overall efficiency lead all priorities, followed closely by reducing time-to-hire and improving the candidate experience. Together, these signals point to enterprise teams working to remove friction from core workflows rather than adding new layers of process.

Just behind those top priorities, enterprise leaders cite using AI to make hiring more efficient, upgrading hiring technology, and increasing offer acceptance rates—reinforcing that technology investment is expected to directly support speed, coordination, and follow-through. Standardizing hiring processes and reducing time-to-schedule also rank highly, highlighting the importance of consistency across teams and regions.

Lower on the list are relationship-building and personalization efforts, suggesting that in 2026, enterprise teams are prioritizing reliability and execution over bespoke experiences.

Nearly all enterprise TA leaders say they are likely or very likely to invest in additional hiring technology in 2026, with very few expressing uncertainty or resistance. This confirms that modernization is not optional at enterprise scale.

At the same time, the priorities data makes one thing clear: technology alone is not the goal. Enterprise teams are investing in tech as a means to improve efficiency, speed, and consistency—especially where manual work and coordination strain have become unsustainable.

Enterprise hiring in 2026: Execution is the strategy

Enterprise hiring in 2026 demands operational resilience.

The organizations best positioned to succeed are not those with the most tools, but those with the most disciplined systems. By modernizing scheduling, centralizing communication, and deploying AI as infrastructure rather than experimentation, enterprise TA teams can regain speed, reduce risk, and restore confidence in their hiring engine.

At enterprise scale, execution is strategy. The teams that fix the mechanics of hiring will be the ones that can withstand pressure—and hire with confidence—in the year ahead.

In 2026, hiring is about so much more than filling open roles—it’s about creating the exceptional hiring experiences that continuously grow a world-class workforce. 

We surveyed over 500 TA, HR, and recruitment leaders to get the real scoop on what’s working and what’s not. You can find all of our findings and the experts’ advice in the 2026 Hiring Insights Report, but in case you’re short on time, I’ve got the seven of 2026’s talent acquisition trends that you can’t miss if you want to hit hiring goals in the coming year.

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Key trends at a glance

1. AI adoption is surging, with 93% of TA leaders planning additional technology investments in 2026

99% of the leaders we surveyed said their teams used some form of automation or AI in the past 12 months. And most did so with the goal of limiting ‘administrivia’, as Jonathon Wall calls it. Jonathon is the Founder of Cassillon.AI and a seasoned recruiting leader with over two decades of experience. More recently, he has focused on helping companies use automation and AI to hit their goals.

“We should be leveraging automation and AI to do those things that aren’t fun,” he tells us. “Recruiting is a very defined process and a lot of what I call ‘administrivia,’ it’s the stuff that recruiters don’t like… They kind of keep us from doing the things that really are our superpowers. We’re people people. The message I would give is to leverage all of those tools so that you can have higher-quality human interactions.”

2. Tech investment leads to higher goal achievement

For our report, we analyzed top-performing TA teams — those who hit 75% or more of their hiring goals over the last 12 months — to see what they did differently and what their focus areas are for 2026.

Compared to everyone else, the highest-achieving recruitment teams were 40% more likely to focus on upgrading their hiring technology. 

Drilling into specific tech, top performers were:

• 28% more likely to adopt automated, candidate-driven interview scheduling
• 25% more likely to use AI-powered interview scheduling tools
• 28% more likely to use AI-powered analytics and reporting

3. Texting candidates the right way

In 2023, nearly every company reported that their talent aquisition teams embraced text recruiting in the past year.

And most companies (52%) are doing so through a centralized platform or text recruiting software. That’s good news because when recruiters text candidates from personal cell phones, or even from a company-provided phone, major compliance risks and process inefficiencies enter the chat.

Risks of texting candidates with a phone instead of a centralized platform:

• Lack of visibility: You can’t see what your recruiters are communicating to candidates.
• Non-standardization: Going off-script and outside of company systems leads to disconnected, inconsistent candidate experiences.
• Inefficient handoff: If a recruiter has something come up or takes time off, there’s no way for someone else on the TA team to seamlessly pick up the conversation with a candidate.
• Security and compliance risks: Personal phone use leaves organizations more vulnerable to data breaches, unauthorized access to sensitive information, and noncompliance with laws regulating unsolicited text messages.

4. The end of manual interview scheduling

As of the end of 2023, over half (51%) of companies were automating interview scheduling, contributing to the significant reduction we saw in the amount of time recruitment teams spent scheduling this year (from 42% in 2022 to 35% in 2023). 

Let’s examine this talent acquisition trend against data from our platform, GoodTime, which automates all aspects of interview scheduling, from candidate communication and availability collection to new interviewer training, performance tracking, and reporting.

GoodTime users taking advantage of the platform’s auto confirm feature achieved an average time-to-schedule of just six days in 2023, which helped them realize an up to 86% reduction in time spent scheduling and a 50% reduction in time-to-hire.

And that time savings can make a major impact on a team’s ability to achieve their goals.

TA teams that automated interview scheduling saw a 13% lift in hiring goal attainment in 2023 versus those that didn’t.

5. Talent retention becomes a shared responsibility

Talent retention broke out far and away as the top hiring challenge of 2023, cited by 34% of TA leaders. With 24% also observing a shortage of qualified candidates, the opportunity cost of replacing employees rises significantly. Not only must organizations invest more to recruit and train new hires, but they also face the added challenge of sourcing candidates who can meet the increasingly complex demands of today’s roles.

But to what extent are TA leaders actually responsible for employee retention? Manjuri Sinha, Global Director of Talent Success & DEI at OLX, thinks TA leaders absolutely share in that responsibility, as it starts with being authentic and realistic in the hiring process.

“I think selling great things about an organization just to get that hire —  those days are gone. Today, we have to be really realistic about things,” she tells us. “People would ask you questions or say, ‘We heard last year you had 15 percent layoffs.’ If that’s the case, be very honest about it.”

In addition, she says TA teams can bolster talent retention by making sure to hire the right managers, who have a major influence on the employee experience. In the current high-pressure market, she says it’s also key to prioritize candidates who can clearly demonstrate adaptability and resilience.

6. Measuring quality of hire

The only way TA teams can know if they are hitting their goals is if they’re measuring their performance properly. We asked which recruitment metrics they’ve got their eye on in 2026.

Far and away, quality of hire was the most important, with a quarter of companies saying it’s their number one performance metric. And while surely every TA leader would say that quality of hire is important, it’s not as straightforward to measure as, say, application completion rate.

So how do you measure quality of hire? Craig Pyke, Director of Talent Acquisition at Rivian, recommends starting simple with data you already have: “You can look at attrition within the first 90 days as one indicator of quality of hire,” he shares. “And when you combine exit survey data of why that they’re leaving with the factor of them attriting within 90 days, you can really start to pinpoint if that’s a TA challenge or if that’s a challenge somewhere within the business. That’s super, super important.”

We like that Craig’s approach measures quality of hire as a function of talent retention, addressing the top challenge TA leaders pointed to in 2023. After all, the right hires will certainly stick around past their probationary period, and the wrong hires will churn and leave your team back at square one.

But what about the other metrics? Skyla Lambeth, Recruiting Operations Manager for Collective Health, laid out a simple starting point to help reveal efficiency gaps from your current data: “It’s crucial to monitor time-to-hire data. Pay close attention to pass-through rates, understanding how many candidates are required at the top of the funnel to make a job offer. Additionally, it’s vital to assess how many candidates successfully progress from the on-site stage or panel interview, especially when multiple people are involved in the interview process.”

7. Candidates are still king

One thing leaders from every sector (mostly) agreed on: The hiring landscape will become even more competitive in 2026 and candidate experience will become increasingly important.

To create a candidate experience that lands top talent in 2026, TA teams think they’ll need to focus on:

• Quickly connecting with candidates (46%)
• Spending more time building meaningful relationships with candidates (45%)
• Increasing the number of candidate touchpoints in their process (42%)

And all of this needs to be done with leaner teams, with 45% anticipating challenges due to recruitment team turnover. Providing a stellar, but sustainable candidate experience requires focusing on the highest-value perks and touchpoints you can offer — the ones that will make a huge difference for candidates, but won’t wear heavily on your recruiting team’s limited resources.

“I would challenge every recruiter to apply to a job on their website and then apply to a job on their competitor’s website. Just spend the time going through and understand what your process is already and you will immediately find ways to improve your candidate experience.”

Amanda Richardson, CEO and Head of People | CoderPad

Another way to ensure you’re making the most of your team? Establishing a reliable and realistic recruiter capacity model.

Use these trends to win top talent in 2026

So how do we put these talent acquisition trends into action? Of course, it will depend on the needs of your specific organization, but you can’t go wrong with a dual approach of embracing new tech and optimizing your processes. Here are three key themes to put on sticky notes:

• Embrace automation and tech to hit more of your hiring goals. Top-performing TA teams were 40% more likely to focus on upgrading hiring technology.
• Renew your commitment to understanding candidates — and addressing their evolving preferences and needs.
• Take it back to basics and enforce standardized processes to support efficiency efforts as well as eliminate unconscious biases.