What’s Driving Hiring in 2026

CXR Podcast – What’s Driving Hiring in 2026
Guests: Matt Plummer & Andrew Flowers

Chris Hoyt: Welcome back, everybody, to the Recruiting Community Podcast. I am Chris Hoyt, President of CXR. I’ve got Gerry Crispin, co-founder of CareerXroads. Gerry, say hi.
Gerry Crispin: Hi.
Chris Hoyt: We’re the hosts of this podcast. What we’re looking to do is bring you industry insights and updates in the form of what we think is a fun conversation — fun for us, at least. It’s all brought to you by the CXR CareerXroads Community.
Today we’re going to be talking with Matt Plummer and Andrew Flowers from Appcast. They’ll be breaking down insights from their 2026 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report, including click-to-hire funnel data, global recruiting cost benchmarks, and related trends. We’re also going to explore where hiring remains most competitive and what the latest job ad best practices reveal about improving recruiting outcomes.
But first — we are streaming everywhere. The YouTubes, the Facebooks, the LinkedIns. Gerry’s right, it really is everywhere. You can also check out cxr.works/podcast to see past and future episodes. Believe it or not, we’re coming up on about 600 interviews. These are leaders, practitioners, and people doing really interesting work — like our guests today. On the site you’ll also find an easy way to like, subscribe, and let us know if you’d like to be part of the conversation.
I mention all of this because it is an ad-free labor of love. Nobody paid to be here. We don’t bring guests in that way. They’re doing good work and we just want to shine a light on that. So with all of that, let’s get started.

Announcer: Welcome to the Recruiting Community Podcast — the go-to channel for talent acquisition leaders and practitioners. This show is brought to you by CXR, a trusted community of thousands, connecting the best minds in the industry to explore topics like attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent. Hosted by Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin. We are thrilled to have you join the conversation.

Chris Hoyt: Andrew, Matt — welcome. Great to have you.
Andrew Flowers: Great to be here.
Chris Hoyt: Let’s start with introductions. Andrew, I won’t steal your thunder on where you work and what you do, but I will say this: you have become a regular in the CXR community. You come in and do a quarterly Recruitonomics overview, and my take is that you’re taking jobs reports and labor market data and translating it into recruiter-speak — breaking it down in a way that recruiters can actually understand why it’s relevant and why it matters. I would argue you’ve been responsible for a genuine increase in interest in economic data within recruiting, because you make it so easy to digest.
Andrew Flowers: Thank you so much for saying that, Chris. It’s really been a pleasure getting to know the CareerXroads community and having that quarterly touchpoint to translate labor economics into, as you said, recruiter-speak. I think this is a critical community for talent acquisition and HR leaders. To introduce myself: I’m the Chief Economist at Appcast. I lead a team of analysts and economists who help both our customers and our product team make sense of labor data and provide insights to optimize recruiting. Happy to be here.
Chris Hoyt: We’re glad to have you back. And Matt, for those who haven’t had the chance to meet you, give us the elevator pitch — who you are and what you do.
Matt Plummer: Thanks for having me. I’m Matt Plummer, Chief Product Officer at Appcast. I’m about six months in, but I spent the previous 12 years building the enterprise business at ZipRecruiter — a company you’ve probably heard advertised on just about every podcast you listen to. That was a great journey into the world of recruitment marketing and talent acquisition. Before that, I spent over 10 years in digital advertising on the technology and product side. I really love the job space because it’s so much more meaningful — you get to be part of the national story of helping companies grow and helping people find their next great opportunity.
Chris Hoyt: Love it. We’re glad to have you on. Don’t mess it up.

Chris Hoyt: So there’s a report that just came out — we’ll throw it up on screen for those watching. The 2026 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report. A lot of really compelling information in here. I want to start with the headline that I think probably stopped a lot of recruiters in their tracks: hiring slowed in 2025, but it actually got more expensive to recruit. How does that happen? And I’m curious — is this a blip, or has something fundamentally changed in our space?
Andrew Flowers: Yeah, it’s counterintuitive. Hiring slowed, but hiring costs rose. To unpack it, it’s really about a compositional change in recruiting. When I say compositional, I mean the types of roles that recruiters are investing dollars behind have shifted. It used to be spread more widely across all types of occupations and industries. But as the labor market shifted in 2025 and many industries saw hiring decline, dollars really concentrated in healthcare and other hard-to-fill roles — skilled trades, physical therapy, and so on. It’s really a story about concentration rather than volume. When the market concentrated in those hard-to-fill roles, it makes sense that costs rose. The composition shifted even as overall hiring slowed down.
Matt Plummer: I’d add to that — if you take a single-employer lens to simplify the problem: imagine you’re hiring across the spectrum and you look at the cost structure. You’d see a very different cost per hire in call center hiring versus IT and technical hiring. When you average those out, you get a blended average. If you reduce your call center hiring and what’s left is mostly technical hiring, your average cost goes up. That’s the concentration Andrew is describing — just put in terms of one employer.
Gerry Crispin: When you talk about healthcare being that central, Andrew — if it weren’t for healthcare, would those numbers look dramatically different? And with so much money potentially being pulled out of Medicaid and Medicare over the next year, is there a dangerous downside risk if we don’t see hiring pick up in other areas?
Andrew Flowers: You’re right that healthcare really was the linchpin of hiring last year and so far into 2026. An amazing statistic from the report: roughly 95% of all net job growth in the U.S. last year came from the healthcare sector. That doesn’t mean 95% of all hires were in healthcare — but that’s where jobs were actually added to the economy.
And to your point about headwinds — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Congress and signed by the president last summer, included roughly $1 trillion in cuts, primarily to Medicaid. Those cuts will roll in over the next decade. When you layer that on top of other forces — an aging population, a constrained pipeline of physicians, nurses, therapists — it’s a lot of pressure on the one sector that’s been carrying the labor market. For 2026 I’m not too worried; the momentum is still strong enough. But when those cuts really kick in in 2027 and beyond, that’s when I’d get more concerned.

Chris Hoyt: There was a term you mentioned on our earlier call that I think is worth unpacking for listeners — the “Great Stay.” Can you break that down?
Andrew Flowers: The Great Stay refers to the decline of quitting. Most workers in America right now are what I’d describe as job-hugging — they’re grateful for the position they have. Quit rates are at really low levels. After the Great Resignation hit an all-time high in quits back in 2022, the opposite trend emerged. When there’s very little dynamism or turnover — when workers aren’t leaving their jobs — hiring naturally slows, because historically roughly two-thirds of all hires are backfills driven by churn and turnover. So a major reason overall hiring is down is simply that people aren’t leaving. That’s the Great Stay.

Chris Hoyt: The report also points to what seem like two very different job markets operating simultaneously — one where candidates are absolutely flooding in, and one where employers say they just can’t find anyone. Matt, how should a TA leader think about which market they’re actually in? And does the macro headline even matter at that point?
Matt Plummer: I think those two phenomena — an overabundance of applicants and an inability to find good talent — are actually intertwined, and we’re seeing it play out across roles and functions, even with the overall decline in job volume.
There’s been an arms race happening for years. When hiring went online and digital with applicant tracking systems, it gave talent acquisition teams technology to work with — as opposed to a stack of paper resumes. But job seekers were largely left without an equivalent tool. Over the last couple of years, that changed. Job seekers found their big weapon: AI that can craft a resume perfectly aligned to any given job using their real background, selecting the right bullets and emphasis, and then facilitate mass applications. Applying to more jobs became much easier, and doing it with a polished, well-matched resume became much easier.
What we’re hearing on the customer side is: “I’m having a hard time distinguishing between all of these candidates because everything is starting to look and feel the same.” So recruiters are asking, how do I read through the noise? That’s the challenge right now.
Chris Hoyt: That resonates with the conversation Andrew and I had about a week ago — this mass supply state where someone could go to bed and wake up with their third-party AI tool having applied to 250 jobs overnight. Are economists and market analysts tracking any impact on apply rates from this? Or is it getting normalized?
Matt Plummer: I don’t think it’s prevalent enough yet to be driving the overall numbers up. I think penetration of these AI application tools on the job seeker side is still relatively low. It’s a longer-term problem — particularly around the erosion of trust between candidates and TA teams. But I’ll leave it to Andrew to speak to how it’s showing up in the current data.
Andrew Flowers: It’s a real impact, but maybe not the dominant one. A good analogy: in the white-collar market, there’s a slowdown in hiring, and people ask, “Is it because of AI?” I think it’s actually broader macroeconomic forces. And the same is probably true for the rise in apply rates. Yes, AI is an important piece. But is it the dominant factor? Maybe not. The more dominant factor may simply be that unemployment is inching up, job-seeker anxiety is rising, and if you’re unemployed, you’re not sending out 30 applications — you’re sending out 300. The dominant story is a slowing labor market. AI is a meaningful contributor, but so is broader displacement in white-collar work.
Gerry Crispin: It’s an upward spiral. As employers find better tools, job seekers find better — and cheaper — tools too. At some point there’s a critical mass where we’re going to need a different way to collect signal from everyone expressing interest. We’re deluding ourselves if we think our AI can reliably differentiate between 250, 500, or 1,000 applicants to find the five or six we should move forward with.
Matt Plummer: I like to use extreme examples to pressure test ideas. I’ve been thinking about some of the active lawsuits dealing with AI-based candidate screening, and how a judge might think about them. The extreme scenario: what if every active job seeker in the market applied to every open role in the market? That would really stress-test how we want to think about the human side of this, the equity side of this, and the technology side. I don’t know what the right answer is, but if that were the case, we’d either say the system is broken and needs to be rebuilt — or, yes, now we absolutely need technology that genuinely solves this.
Gerry Crispin: Well, the interesting thing is that in that scenario, every job seeker could join the class action suits — because they could all prove they applied, they’re over 40, and they deserve their piece of the action when it comes to fruition.
Chris Hoyt: You can always tell what side of the camp Jerry’s on.

Chris Hoyt: For the first time, this report tracks what it costs to move a candidate all the way from a click on a job ad through to an actual hire. Was there a big reveal? What did the data show that recruiters maybe couldn’t see before — and was anything a surprise for either of you?
Andrew Flowers: I’ll tout the innovation here. The product team at Appcast, led by Matt, has really enabled this click-to-hire tracking — not just from click to hire, but all the intermediary stages. For the first time in the 10 years we’ve been putting out this report, we have full-funnel benchmarks: $0.83 per click, $19 per apply, $131 per screen, and so on down through per interview, per offer, and $1,053 per hire. And when we talk about cost here, we mean recruitment marketing cost behind attracting talent.
Beyond the benchmarks themselves, what’s really powerful is that it enables funnel diagnostics. A recruiter can now ask: where am I underperforming in conversion? Am I struggling at the interview-to-offer stage? Is it because hiring managers are being too selective? You can only glean those kinds of micro decision points when you understand how you stack up against other employers at each stage.
Matt Plummer: The first question we almost always get when we show a customer any funnel analysis is some version of “how does this compare?” — to competitors, to others in the same industry, to other TA teams. They need a benchmark. What I like about what we’re able to do is map each customer’s individual definition of quality and their individual stage definitions so we can optimize against what “good” actually means for them. But then we normalize those definitions so that benchmarks are apples-to-apples across customers. So a customer can see their data next to an industry peer cut or the overall model — and that helps them communicate upward, understand where they stand, and figure out what they might need to change.

Chris Hoyt: That brings up something interesting. Quality of hire seemed to be on the upswing as a focus for TA leaders — and then the AI wave came in and a lot of things went sideways. But in the last four to six months, I’m hearing that interest in tracking quality is coming back. Are you all hearing the same from your clients? That there’s renewed interest but still a lot of uncertainty about how to measure it, who can help, what the levers are — and even internal misalignment on what quality actually means?
Matt Plummer: Oh, absolutely. The definitions are all over the place. I’ll be honest — I don’t love the word “quality” because it sounds like a subjective judgment of a human being. “Qualified” is more accurate, but it’s a mouthful, and “high-intent, highly qualified” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So we end up using “quality.”
But the definition varies wildly. For some, it means reaching the interview stage. For others, it means being passed to a hiring manager, completing a phone screen, or simply meeting stated qualifications — regardless of whether you can even reach the candidate. What most people can agree on, though, is that they want someone who is genuinely qualified, who actually intended to apply to this specific job, and who is responsive — meaning you can actually reach them.
Gerry Crispin: I’d add one thing that comes even before “qualified” — whether the human who applied is actually a human. That fraud question is now a new checkpoint in the process.
Chris Hoyt: Fair point. And we have leaders pushing for “slate, not hire” metrics — looking at what recruiting actually controls, separate from retention. We’re not done wrestling with this by a long shot, but I say that having been in this space 28 years. We were fighting about quality of hire and source of hire when I started.
Gerry Crispin: Yeah.

Chris Hoyt: I’d like to talk about something that’s relatively new in the scheme of recruiting: the report showed that salary transparency consistently lifts apply rates, but plenty of employers are still not posting pay ranges. What’s actually holding that back? And at what point does hiding the number start costing more than showing it?
Andrew Flowers: Salary transparency has really taken off. State-level laws in California, New York, and many others drove widespread adoption. Indeed, for example, has reported that over 50% of job postings on their platform now include an actual salary or wage range within the posting — not imputed, not estimated. It’s been a sea change.
In our benchmark report, we showed not just that jobs with salary transparency have better conversion for job seekers, but that the gap is growing year over year. The conversion advantage between a posting with transparent salary versus one without has actually widened from 2024 to 2025. The sheer volume of salary-transparent postings exploded through 2023 and 2024, and while the growth rate has tapered a bit, we haven’t seen any decline. It remains a huge driver of candidate self-sorting — helping people quickly assess whether a role is the right fit.
So to your question: what’s stopping employers from adding it voluntarily, even in states where it’s not required? In my experience talking to TA leaders, it almost always comes down to the internal equity conversation. Posting a range is one thing — but it’s another thing entirely when a current employee sees that posting and says, “Wait, I’m on the lower end of that range. What’s going on?” The internal equity alignment is one of the biggest impediments.
Chris Hoyt: I agree completely. That’s exactly the biggest issue.
Gerry Crispin: But it won’t change at scale unless there are consequences for not complying. In the states where there are consequences, I’d bet you’re seeing the highest compliance rates. It would be wonderful if everyone just wanted to do it — because it’s the right thing and it drives better outcomes. But I think the stick is going to be what moves the needle on this issue for quite a while.
Chris Hoyt: Stick rather than carrot. Yep.

Chris Hoyt: Last question before we let you go. If a TA leader goes through this report and they need to pick one thing to fix in their recruitment marketing tomorrow — something they can actually do, not just a trend to watch — what would that be? Matt, let’s start with you.
Matt Plummer: I’d look at the funnel analysis benchmarks and ask: do I have operational bottlenecks somewhere in my TA organization? Take your full application-to-hire funnel, break it down by the stages that matter to you, and compare group A to group B, region A to region B. Find the outliers — the places where performance diverges from the norm. I guarantee you’ll find at least one that stands out, and whether it’s a people issue, a process issue, or something further up funnel, there’s an optimization to be made.
Andrew Flowers: That’s absolutely key. I’d add an adjacent issue: look at how your jobs are splitting between what I’d call “standing-up jobs” and “sitting-down jobs.” Whether it’s through immigration trends or the native-born younger population going to college and expecting corporate roles, there’s a growing bifurcation. It’s very hard to hire HVAC technicians, nurse practitioners, skilled tradespeople. And then there’s the other side — sitting-down jobs — where AI and immigration are both accelerating the split. Benchmark your full funnel — as Matt says — but also benchmark it by occupation group, with a clear sense of which occupations are more exposed to AI displacement versus labor shortages.
Chris Hoyt: Well done. I think those are both great answers — and pretty complementary.
Matt Plummer: Definitely a better answer than mine.
Chris Hoyt: They’re both great.

Chris Hoyt: Before we cut you loose — we ask everybody this before we wrap: if you were going to write a book about this conversation or the current state of things, what would the title be? Andrew, we’ll start with you.
Andrew Flowers: I actually gave this some thought, since I’ve watched enough past episodes to know you ask this. My title would be Help Wanted. The subtitle: Who’s Going to Do the Work? The Coming Labor Shortage. I’m a firm believer that AI automation is actually a good thing — because it’s a counterweight to an aging population and declining birth rates in advanced economies. In the future, who’s going to do the actual work of roofing, of home healthcare? With lower fertility rates, population shrinkage, and now reduced immigration, I think we’re looking at real labor shortages in those standing-up jobs. So: Help Wanted.
Chris Hoyt: Love it.
Matt Plummer: I live with two teenage daughters, so my book title is going to be in emoji: the shrugging guy, with the head-exploding guy on top. That’s it. That’s the whole title.
Chris Hoyt: I’m not sure how that gets marketed, but it’s brilliant.
Gerry Crispin: Very visual.
Chris Hoyt: Matt, who gets the first signed copy?
Matt Plummer: I’ve gotta give it to the kids. They’re the inspiration for the title. They’re the inspiration for what I do. They won’t read it, just to be clear — but it’ll go on the shelf for later.
Chris Hoyt: Maybe you get the AI to translate it into emoji. Then the kids will love it.

Chris Hoyt: Before we go, Gerry and I want to do a little self-promotion. We have a very exciting launch that just went out this week: the CXR Recruiting Awards. These are open to any organization that wants to submit — and they are completely free to enter. You can check out all the details at cxrrecruitingawards.com.
This is the 2026 AI Edition. We’re looking for how organizations — specifically their operations teams or TA teams — have used AI to enhance the recruiting function. We’re not looking for “we signed a contract with a vendor.” We’re looking for everything from a master prompt to a workflow change to a complete transformation — done by a recruiter or the recruiting team.
The submission deadline is April 25th. We have practitioners and experts serving as judges. There are finalists awards, and we’re doing a live dinner and awards ceremony on June 9th and 10th at our Marketplace live event in Louisville, Kentucky. Check it all out at the website, and spread the word.
Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. We’ll make sure to put a download link in the show notes — this is genuinely one of the better reports to come out, and I’d encourage every TA leader to get through it.
Matt Plummer: Thank you so much for having us, and thanks to the CareerXroads community.
Andrew Flowers: It’s been a pleasure.
Chris Hoyt: We’ll see everybody next time.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Recruiting Community Podcast, where talent acquisition leaders connect, learn, and grow together. Be sure to visit cxr.works/podcast to explore past episodes, see what’s coming up next, and find out how you can join the conversation. Whether you’ve got insights to share or want to be a guest on the show, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re interested in learning more about becoming a member of the CXR community, visit cxr.works. We’ll catch you in the next episode.