2026
Hiring
Insights
Report
How 500+ talent leaders redefine hiring with AI and innovation
Introduction
At the same time, long-standing operational bottlenecks, especially scheduling, continue to slow hiring when speed matters most. The result is a market where authenticity, efficiency, and execution discipline are no longer differentiators; they are prerequisites.
Yet the teams that are outperforming the market tell a different story. They didn’t respond to pressure by simply adding headcount, or even by cutting it. Instead, they reorganized. Top-performing teams redesigned roles, workflows, and responsibilities around an AI-enabled reality, using automation to absorb operational load while elevating human judgment, coordination, and candidate connection.
These teams automate intentionally, standardize what should be repeatable, and leverage AI for insight—not just efficiency. In doing so, they protect the human touchpoints that define great hiring experiences, even as their processes become faster and more resilient.
I hope this year’s report inspires you to build toward that future—one where technology amplifies human connection rather than replaces it, and where hiring teams are structured to operate with confidence in an increasingly complex market.
Warm regards,
Ahryun Moon
CEO and Co-Founder
GoodTime
Table of contents
SECTION ONE
2025’s hiring challenges and lessons learned
SECTION TWO
Winning top talent in 2026
SECTION THREE
What top-performing TA teams do differently
SECTION FOUR
Enterprise in focus
SECTION SIX
Final thoughts & appendix
Executive summary
Key findings
of companies missed their hiring goals
1 in 3
missed by a wide margin.
Scheduling remains the biggest operational tax on hiring (38% of recruiter time)
of organizations saw time-to-hire increase in 2025
1 in 9
companies succeeded in reducing time-to-hire.
Top-performing TA teams operate fundamentally differently. They were:
74%
more likely to use AI agents for interview scheduling
35%
more likely to use a centralized platform for texting candidates
25%
more likely to choose quality-of-hire as their #1 metric
of TA teams use, pilot, or plan to use AI agents, making AI effectively mandatory
Fraudulent or AI-generated candidates have emerged as the #1 threat for 2026
Takeaways for decision-makers
Redesign hiring workflows around AI agents: not just for automation, but for insight. Prioritize AI for scheduling, analytics, and bottleneck detection.
Standardize communication and eliminate manual scheduling by adopting centralized texting platforms and self-serve scheduling/rescheduling.
Build defenses against fake/AI candidates through structured interviews, skills validation, and clearer candidate authentication protocols.
Anchor your hiring strategy in quality-of-hire and funnel health metrics, the signature measurement system of top performers.
Invest in efficiency-first transformation. Upgrade hiring tech, optimize automation end-to-end, and redesign TA roles to elevate strategic and analytical work.
Strengthen TA team resilience with better tools, clearer workflows, and organizational structures that support speed without sacrificing candidate trust.
About this report
In November of 2025, GoodTime commissioned a study of 504 senior talent acquisition (TA) leaders across the U.S. to examine critical hiring challenges and the solutions being adopted to address them. Respondents spanned the tech, manufacturing, finance, retail, and healthcare sectors and represented Directors to C-Suite executives at organizations with 1,000 or more employees.
This report was developed with scientific rigor in partnership with Qualtrics, based on a set of research questions identified by subject matter experts as relevant to emerging trends in the current hiring landscape. More information on the survey methodology can be found in the appendix of this report.
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