The "Hiring Boom" Is a Mirage

Hey everyone, Neil here. You're reading High-Signal Hiring. Hiring systems from 20+ years of global recruitment experience and 500+ technical hires. Zero noise and instantly actionable.

Last issue, we covered why your next hire should cost more, not because the market's inflated, but because the job is bigger than it used to be. If you've started rethinking headcount vs. capability per head, you're already ahead.

This week, our LinkedIn feeds have been flooded with headlines saying tech hiring is booming again. PM roles at a 3-year high. Engineering openings up 90% in the US. Recruiter demand near 2022 peaks.

Sounds great. But the numbers don't tell the full story.

You'll learn what those stats aren't showing you, what the market actually looks like for founders hiring engineers right now, and how to calibrate your expectations before you plan your next hire.

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Yes, hiring activity is up. Lenny Rachitsky's data from last week shows 67,000+ open engineering roles globally and 26,000 in the US alone. CoderPad reports technical assessments up 48% since mid-2023. Those are real numbers.

But up from what?

Tech job postings more than doubled between 2020 and 2022. Then they fell off a cliff. Through 2023 and into early 2024, the market hit its lowest point in five years. The Pragmatic Engineer reported that software engineering listings dropped to 65% of January 2020 levels, a fraction of their mid-2022 peak.

So when you see "up 90%," that's recovery from the bottom. Not growth from a healthy baseline. A stock that drops 50% and then rises 90% hasn't doubled. It's barely back to where it started. Same dynamic here.

The hiring market isn't booming. It's healing. And healing looks very different depending on who you're trying to hire.

Here's what the headline stats hide: the market has split in two.

At the top end, there's genuine scarcity. AI-capable senior engineers, the ones who can orchestrate agents, verify output, and ship autonomously (the profile we've been building across Issues 13-16), are in serious demand. CoderPad's 2026 report lists AI/ML specialists and full-stack developers as the toughest roles to fill. That tracks with what I'm seeing across my clients. The candidates with genuine AI-enabled engineering experience are getting multiple approaches a week. They're not on job boards, they're not applying, and they know exactly what they're worth.

At the entry level, it's the opposite. Junior developer hiring is down 73% year on year. Most companies have stopped backfilling junior roles entirely because AI handles much of what juniors used to do (we covered this in Issue 16).

So "67,000 open engineering roles" is technically accurate. But a large portion of those roles require a profile that most of the available talent pool doesn't match. Candidates are applying for jobs they're not qualified for, and the roles they could fill are disappearing.

The market isn't loosening in your favour. If anything, competition for the engineers who matter has intensified.

How many of those 67,000 roles are actually getting filled?

Research from Resume Builder found that 40% of tech companies posted fake jobs in the past year, and 79% of those still had active listings at the time of the survey. A separate analysis of LinkedIn data found that roughly 1 in 4 job listings are ghost jobs with no real intent to hire. The industry calls it "talent pipelining" (a generous term for it). In practice, it's companies keeping roles open to build candidate databases, signal growth to investors, or keep their options open without committing to a hire.

This has been standard industry practice for decades, but it's gotten worse. Companies running "always-on" job postings that have been live for six months with no urgency to close. It inflates the numbers and distorts the picture for everyone else in the market.

The real competition for talent is smaller than the job boards suggest. You're not up against 67,000 openings. You're up against the companies that are actually hiring, with a real role, a real budget, and a process that can close. That's a much smaller number, and that's actually good news if you have a real role and a process that works.

Jason Lemkin flagged something on SaaStr worth paying attention to. He calls it "invisible unemployment."

66% of CEOs surveyed plan to either cut headcount or hold it flat in 2026. But they're not announcing layoffs. The strategy is quieter. When someone leaves, try AI first. If the AI can handle 60-70% of the role, don't backfill. If it can't, hire, but hire one person instead of two.

No announcements, no layoff headlines. Headcount just quietly flatlines.

The roles that DO get posted are genuinely critical and hard to fill. The rest quietly disappear through attrition. That's why the jobs showing up on boards are almost exclusively senior, AI-enabled positions.

Here's how I'd think about all of this if I were planning a hire right now:

Recalibrate your expectations on pipeline volume.
If you're hiring an AI-capable senior engineer, the qualified candidate pool for your specific role is small. I'm talking maybe 20-30 genuinely qualified people in your market, depending on your stack and location. Most of them are employed, not looking, and getting approached regularly. You need a sourcing strategy that reaches them directly, not a job posting and a prayer. If you're relying on inbound applications, you'll get volume, but the signal-to-noise ratio will be brutal.

Use the bifurcation to your advantage.
The split market means most companies are fishing in the wrong part of the pool. They're posting generic "senior engineer" roles and wondering why the pipeline is weak. If you know what profile you're actually hiring for (we covered this across Issues 13-16), that clarity is a competitive advantage. A precise role description that signals AI-enabled expectations will repel the wrong candidates and attract the right ones. Let it filter.

Don't confuse headline optimism with your reality.
The biggest risk of the "hiring is booming" narrative is that it makes founders think the market is in their favour. It's not. Not for the roles you need. The companies winning right now are the ones that understand the gap between the headline and the reality, and they're acting accordingly. They're paying above market (Issue 16), running tight processes, and sourcing proactively instead of waiting for candidates to come to them.

The headline is real. Hiring is up. But for the roles that matter to early-stage founders, the market is tighter, more competitive, and less straightforward than the stats suggest. Read the numbers. Just don't stop there.

Cheers
Neil