Recruiting trends for 2027: what the official data shows

Hiring is flat going into 2027, and recruiting is still hard. The US hires rate was 3.3% in August 2026, against 3.2% a year earlier, while the quits rate was 1.9%, against 2.0%. UK vacancies fell 2.9% on the quarter to 691,000 in July to September 2026, an early estimate. The EU job vacancy rate was 2.0% in the second quarter of 2026. Meanwhile candidates use AI to apply, and an early experiment puts AI on the interviewer’s side.

This page lines up the official numbers, the surveys and forecasts worth reading, and our view of where recruiters’ work shifts. Figures are as of October 27, 2026. Each official figure in the table below carries its period and the date of its next update, so you can refresh it yourself. Survey and forecast figures in the text name the period where the publisher gives one, and most are one-off reports with no update date.

The labor market in official numbers

Seven million openings in August and seven million unemployed people in September sound like a match made in a spreadsheet. Anyone who has filled a role knows how that match goes: the openings and the people rarely share a skill, a city or a salary expectation.

The US picture is a market that moves slowly. Nonfarm payroll employment changed little in September 2026, with a gain of 29,000. Employers made 5.2 million hires in August and 3.1 million people quit.

Flat hiring, flat quitting

A hires rate of 3.3% beside a quits rate of 1.9% describes a market where people mostly stay put. Both rates are barely changed from a year earlier, when hires were 3.2% and quits 2.0%. The quits rate can serve as a measure of workers’ willingness or ability to leave jobs. When it is low, passive candidates may have less reason to answer a recruiter’s message, so we would budget more sourcing time per hire, even in teams whose open roles look healthy on paper.

That is our reading and not a measured effect: no source we opened ties quits rates to sourcing time. Test it on your own funnel by tracking the reply rate from employed candidates against last year’s.

The UK and the EU

The UK shows soft demand and steady pay growth. Vacancies were 691,000 in July to September 2026, down 21,000 on April to June, according to an early estimate. Payrolled employees fell by 111,000, or 0.4%, between August 2025 and August 2026. The provisional estimate for September is a fall of 66,000, or 0.2%, on the year. Annual growth in regular pay, excluding bonuses, was 3.7% in June to August 2026.

Surveys of UK employers and recruiters give a mixed picture. In CIPD’s Summer 2026 Labour Market Outlook, only 62% of employers planned to recruit over the next three months, and the median expected basic pay award for the next 12 months was 3%. KPMG and REC, whose panel is around 400 recruitment and employment consultancies, reported that permanent placements rose in September at the strongest rate in four years, although the rise was marginal. Demand for workers still fell, at the weakest rate in just over two years, and KPMG’s Jon Holt called the recovery fragile.

In the EU, the job vacancy rate was 2.0% in Q2 2026, down from 2.1% in Q1 2026 and in Q2 2025. The euro area rate was 2.1%, down from 2.3% in Q1 2026 and 2.2% in Q2 2025.

Across the OECD, total employment is at an all-time high and projected to keep growing this year and next, according to an OECD press release (July 2026, per its web address). The same release says real wages remain below their level of five years ago in around one-third of OECD countries. Both statements can be true at once, which is what makes salary conversations with candidates so awkward.

Recruiting is still hard

Low hiring has not made recruiting easy. In SHRM’s 2026 Talent Trends survey of 2,094 US HR professionals, fielded in February 2026, 68% reported difficulty recruiting full-time employees. Within that group, 53% said recruiting had become more difficult than a year earlier. Separately, 42% of all respondents reported difficulty retaining full-time employees in the past 12 months.

SHRM’s release also points to widening skills gaps. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, a global employer survey, expects 39% of workers’ existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated over 2025 to 2030. Two-thirds of the surveyed employers plan to hire people with specific AI skills, and skill gaps are named as the biggest barrier to business transformation among the employers surveyed. The report dates from January 2025 and is the newest edition we found.

The people doing the hiring face their own market. BLS projects employment of human resources specialists to grow 6% from 2025 to 2035, with about 73,700 openings a year on average and a median wage of $75,940 in May 2025. BLS also expects firms that specialize in HR services to grow faster than in-house HR as companies contract out those services.

AI in applications and interviews

In a Gartner survey from the fourth quarter of 2024 of 3,290 job candidates, 39% said they used AI during the application process. Gartner also reports, in a survey whose wave it does not state, that only 26% of candidates trust AI to evaluate them fairly. Candidates use software to write applications, and the experiment below puts software on the interviewer’s side too. Somewhere, a bot may be impressing another bot.

Two forecasts, one survey result and one experiment frame the next year:

• Gartner predicted in October 2025 that 75% of hiring processes will include certifications and tests for workplace AI proficiency by 2027.
• Gartner predicted in July 2025 that one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028.
• In a Gartner survey from the second quarter of 2025, 51% of candidates accepted a job offer in their most recent application process, against 74% in the second quarter of 2023.
• In a field experiment with 70,000 applicants, those interviewed by AI voice agents were 12% more likely to receive job offers than those interviewed by human recruiters, according to a preprint revised in September 2026.

Treat the last item with care. It is a preprint with no journal reference shown, and we found no sign of peer review. The abstract names no firm, country or job type. The authors report no decline in the productivity of hired workers, which is the question a skeptic should ask first. One experiment does not settle whether AI interviews are fair.

Verification becomes the recruiter’s job

Gartner’s survey from the fourth quarter of 2024 found about four in ten candidates using AI, and Gartner forecasts that one in four candidate profiles will be fake by 2028. A polished application may no longer tell you whether the person can do the work, so we would shift effort from screening documents to checking ability. That means a short work sample done live, one in-person or live-video round for finalists, and identity checks at the offer stage.

The cost is time, and the benefit is trust in the final shortlist, so keep the heavy checks for finalists. Gartner’s second-quarter 2025 survey gives some comfort on the candidate side: 62% of candidates said they are more likely to apply if the organization requires in-person interviews. A survey answer measures intent, so take it as a hint about in-person rounds. It suggests that step is unlikely to scare off most candidates.

What we could not confirm

Some numbers we could not confirm from a source we could read in full, so we left them out:

• KPMG and REC publish index values for permanent placements, but the text of the press release we opened gives direction in words only.
• We could read only the summary of the OECD press release, not its full text, so we cite its headline claims and no growth percentages.
• Figures that circulate on vendor blogs, such as the share of talent acquisition leaders adding autonomous agents, trace to no source we could open.

Using this in your 2027 plan

Pick the rows that match the markets you hire in and put the next release dates in your calendar: November 3 for US JOLTS, November 17 for the ONS UK update, and December 16 for Eurostat’s planned update of its vacancy article. Then compare each new release with the table above. A change in the US quits rate may be a useful signal to set beside your own reply rates.

Build the hiring volumes and recruiter capacity into your recruiting plan template. For a wider view of the people function, read HR trends for 2027 and talent acquisition trends for 2027, and check AI hiring laws by jurisdiction before you add an AI interview step. Pay plans for new hires belong beside salary increase budgets for 2027.

Written and reviewed by the HR Riant Editorial Team. General information, not legal advice.