Dive Brief:
- Ninety percent of U.S. companies said they missed their hiring goals, with 1 in 3 reporting they missed those goals by a wide margin, according to the fifth annual Hiring Insights Report from recruiting software company GoodTime.
- The independent study, which surveyed more than 500 U.S. talent acquisition leaders at companies with more than 1,000 employees in November 2025, found that recruiters spend 38% of their time scheduling interviews, meaning “scheduling remains the biggest operational tax on hiring,” per the report.
- While 99.8% of TA teams said they either use or plan to use AI agents, the report noted an uptick in “fraudulent” or AI-assisted candidates — making fraud the most anticipated hiring challenge in 2026.
Dive Insight:
The hiring market is under an “unprecedented strain,” GoodTime researchers said, with 60% of organizations seeing time-to-hire increase in 2025, and only 1 in 9 companies saying they had reduced time-to-hire. Likewise, a June report from Robert Half found that 93% of hiring managers said the hiring process took longer in 2025 than just two years ago.
The report from GoodTime outlined what kind of AI use in hiring could be useful to recruiters. Top-performing TA teams reorganized roles and workflows around AI instead of adding recruiters or relying on top-of-funnel automation, per the report.
The result, researchers said, was a hiring process that moved more quickly, surfaced better signals, protected candidate experience and improved quality-of-hire, all without growing their TA teams.
Still, TA leaders said they were “divided on whether hiring conditions will become more or less competitive in 2026,” per the report, which concluded that this sentiment reflects “a fragmented market shaped by role-specific demand and uneven adoption of modern hiring infrastructure.”
Ahryun Moon, CEO and co-founder of GoodTime, said in a release that the hiring challenge in 2026 isn’t about adding more people or cutting teams, but rather about redesigning the hiring workflow “so humans keep their focus on judgment, relationships, and the moments that truly require a human touch.”
