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thumbay-hospital-fujairah-performs-first-reported-awake-endoscopic-spine-fusion-in-the-northern-emirate/”>First-quarter job postings dropped year over year across major markets, industries, and functions. Actual employment has held up better, pointing to a two-speed labor market.
A forward-looking signal of labor demand, job posting activity highlights where talent is and is not in demand well before its codification in official statistics. The start of 2026 brought a drop in job postings year over year across the major markets and industries tracked by Bain’s AuraSM platform.
This decline in job postings does not equate to a proportional decline in employment. Much of the year-over-year drop likely reflects a normalization from historically elevated posting volumes from 2022 to 2025, a period during which companies posted aggressively and often beyond their immediate needs. Across several markets, actual employment rates remain steady even as posting activity contracts.
Bain & Company finds that the result is not a broad-based contraction so much as a two-speed labor market as firm demand in specific functions, geographies, and AI-adjacent roles coexists with continued structural weakness elsewshere. Four strategic implications stand out for the way organizations access, develop, and deploy talent.
Labor demand is lower than 2025 levels across regions. France (–25%), the United States (–23%), and India and the Netherlands (both –22%) have suffered the largest drop in postings year over year. The UK and Canada (both –7%) and Japan and Italy (both –11%) fared better. In some cases, declines are steepest in markets where posting volumes remained elevated through 2025.
Note that the Aura database tracks job postings across online platforms and may underrepresent sectors with high informal or offline hiring such as agriculture, construction, and domestic services. In markets like Brazil or India, where these sectors are significant, posting-based metrics may diverge from broader employment surveys and employer intent data.
Hiring is weak across industries. Internet job postings are down more than 50% from last year’s first quarter, while job postings for financial services are 28% lower. Hospitals and healthcare are down 22%, and information technology (–20%) and computer software (–19%) are also weaker. Human resources (–7%) and staffing and recruiting (–12%) have been relatively more resilient.
The severity of declines varies significantly across industries, but a common thread is the unwinding of pandemic-era hiring surges. Sectors that expanded most aggressively from 2021 to 2022 (internet, software, IT services) are now experiencing steep corrections.
Postings are down in every function. Bain & Company finds that across functions, companies are consolidating headcount. Research, design, and development has seen the greatest drop, down 37% from the first quarter of 2025, followed by marketing (–30%), sales (–27%), and strategy and analytics (–26%). The news is somewhat better in HR (–12%) and other general and administrative functions (–10%).
AI hiring rebounded but remains volatile. After declining in late 2025, AI-related hiring showed a sharp recovery in the first quarter, with strong month-to-month gains in January (+11%) and March (+17%). The shift from contraction to growth suggests earlier slowdowns may have been cyclical rather than structural. At the same time, month-to-month fluctuations indicate that hiring is still ramping up in phases rather than along a steady trajectory. Demand remains concentrated in technology and talent-focused industries, with broader adoption still uneven. Notably, AI-related posting growth coincides with broader declines in generalist technical roles, suggesting that AI is driving a recomposition of workforce demand rather than net expansion.
The age of broad-based hiring expansion is over. For workforce leaders, the implication is clear: Organizations that are gaining ground are those making deliberate, targeted investments in the capabilities that matter. The question is no longer “When will hiring recover?” but “Where is demand accelerating, and are we positioned to compete for that talent?”