interviewstream Hiring Experience Report: 2026

Reducing Friction. Building Better Hiring Experiences.

How the best hiring teams are hiring faster, cutting friction, and building more human hiring processes in 2026.

Table of contents

• Executive Summary
• The State of Hiring in 2026
• The Modern Candidate Has Changed
• What Candidates Are Saying
• The Great Hiring Disconnect
• The Biggest Sources of Hiring Friction
• What High-Performing Hiring Teams Do Differently
• Hiring Trends by Industry
• Hiring Myths to Leave Behind
• Hiring Benchmarks That Matter
• The Future of Hiring
• Building Better Hiring Experiences in 2026

Executive Summary

The average job in the U.S. takes about 42 days to fill, according to SHRM’s 2025 Talent Trends Report. Candidates now sit through an average of 20 interviews before getting an offer, up from 14 just a few years ago, according to Gem’s 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks Report, which analyzed more than 140 million job applications.

Hiring has gotten slower and more demanding at exactly the moment candidates have gotten more selective about how they’re treated. That gap, between what recruiting teams need and what candidates will put up with, defines hiring in 2026.

This report draws on research from SHRM, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gem, LinkedIn, Pew Research Center, the Learning Policy Institute, AAMC, NSI Nursing Solutions, Deloitte, the Urban Institute, and other independent research organizations, to build a clear picture of what’s actually happening in hiring right now.

The State of Hiring in 2026

Hiring has never had this many moving parts at once.

The average recruiter is managing around 20 open requisitions at a time, according to SHRM’s 2025 Recruiting Benchmarking Report. Application volume keeps climbing too. Employers received an average of 257.6 applications per job in 2025, according to Employ’s 2025 Hiring Benchmarks Report, up from 207.2 the year before.

More applicants should make hiring easier. It hasn’t. Talent acquisition teams hit only 47.9% of their hiring goals in 2024, the lowest attainment rate in four years of tracking, according to GoodTime’s 2025 Hiring Insights Report. By 2025, GoodTime found that 90% of companies missed at least one hiring goal outright.

A few forces are behind this.

• Labor shortages are concentrated, not universal. Some fields, like nursing, skilled trades, cybersecurity, and special education, face real shortages of qualified people. Others face a shortage of decision-making speed, not talent.
• A generational shift changed what workers expect from a job search. Younger candidates in particular treat a job search the way they treat any other transaction. They expect speed, clarity, and a mobile-friendly experience, and they’ll walk away from a process that doesn’t deliver.
• Candidate expectations around speed and transparency have risen faster than most hiring processes have adapted. Candidates increasingly expect pay information upfront, a fast first response, and a clear timeline. Many processes still don’t offer any of the three.
• Recruiter workloads keep climbing without matching support. Interview volume alone rose 42% since 2021, from 14 interviews per hire to 20, according to Gem’s research. More interviews mean more scheduling, more feedback loops, and more days on the calendar before anyone signs an offer letter.

Key Statistics

• Time-to-Fill: SHRM’s 2025 Talent Trends Report puts the national average at around 42 days. Broader benchmarking datasets that measure the entire process, from requisition to accepted offer, put the number closer to 60 days. The gap comes down to methodology. Time-to-fill and time-to-hire measure different starting points, and mixing them up is one of the most common benchmarking mistakes hiring teams make.
• Turnover: Overall U.S. separations ran at about 3.3% a month in mid-2025, per BLS JOLTS data. Annual turnover varies enormously by industry, from roughly 11% in government to more than 75% in hospitality.
• Application Completion: Around 6 in 10 candidates abandon a job application before finishing it, most commonly because the form is too long or they’re unsure if they qualify, according to research compiled by SHRM, LiveCareer, and CareerPlug.
• Candidate Expectations: 57.8% of U.S. job postings included salary information by late 2024, up from 52.2% the year before, per Indeed Hiring Lab. Most candidates now expect a full application to take under 30 minutes.
• AI Adoption: 43% of organizations used AI for HR or recruiting tasks in 2025, nearly double the 26% that did in 2024, according to SHRM’s 2025 Talent Trends Report.

The Modern Candidate Has Changed

Today’s candidates expect more than a fair shot at the job. They expect:

• Faster communication
• Flexible interview experiences
• Mobile-first application processes
• Transparency throughout hiring
• Human interaction at the moments that matter
• Respect for their time

On communication: ghosting has become a two-way frustration. SHRM’s Talent Trends Report lists candidates dropping out of the process as one of the top three pain points recruiters report, right behind a shortage of qualified applicants and heavy competition from other employers. From the other side, 53% of candidates say they’ve been ghosted by an employer during a job search, according to a 2025 survey of over 1,000 candidates by iHire.

On mobile: most applications are now started or completed on a phone. Career sites that aren’t built for that lose candidates fast. Roughly 4 in 10 candidates will abandon an application outright if it isn’t mobile-friendly.

On transparency: pay transparency has gone from a nice-to-have to an expectation. SHRM found that organizations posting pay ranges see about 70% more applicants, and 66% say the quality of those applicants is higher too.

On respect for time: when researchers asked candidates why they walked away from a hiring process mid-stream, the top answer wasn’t pay. It was feeling like their time wasn’t respected, according to SHRM.

Convenience, flexibility, speed, accessibility, transparency. That’s the short list of what actually moves candidates through a process today. Miss more than one of them and the best people go elsewhere.

What Candidates Are Saying

The data backs this up, and it’s more nuanced than a simple yes or no on video.

CareerPlug’s 2025 Candidate Experience Report found that 70% of candidates still say they prefer in-person interviews when given the choice. Dig one layer deeper, though, and the actual complaint isn’t about video as a format. It’s about how video gets used.

One-way video interviews result in a 58% reduction in time-to-offer and an 81% decrease in time spent on each interview. Convenience and connection aren’t opposites. Candidates want both, and the processes that deliver both are the ones winning talent.

What Candidates Actually Complain About

• Long processes with too many rounds. Interview counts per hire rose from 14 to 20 since 2021, a 42% jump, per Gem’s research.
• Silence. Applying, interviewing, or even finishing a final round and then hearing nothing.
• Scheduling friction. Endless email back and forth just to land a time. Recruiters report spending about 38% of their week on scheduling alone, according to GoodTime.
• AI making decisions about them without a person involved. 66% of Americans say they wouldn’t want to apply for a job where AI helps make the hiring decision, according to Pew Research Center.
• Not knowing where they stand or what happens next.

What They Rarely Complain About

• The interview happening on camera instead of in person.
• A process flexible enough to fit around a current job.
• Being told upfront, clearly, how long something will take.

The pattern holds across formats. While there may be some hesitancy at first (although hesitation around video dwindles with every generation), candidates are rejecting being kept in the dark.

The Great Hiring Disconnect

Ask a recruiter what’s broken about hiring and you’ll get one answer. Ask a candidate and you’ll get a completely different one. Both are right.

42% of recruiters report being under real pressure to fill roles faster, according to LinkedIn research cited by HR Dive. Meanwhile, only about 26% of North American candidates say they’ve had a genuinely great hiring experience, according to research compiled by JobScore.

Both numbers are true at the same time, and that’s the disconnect. The highest-performing hiring teams don’t pick a side. They find ways to:

• Hire faster
• Improve the candidate experience
• Reduce administrative workload
• Maintain human connection throughout the process

Doing all four is what separates hiring teams that consistently land top talent from teams that don’t.

The Biggest Sources of Hiring Friction

Candidate Friction

Lengthy applications, scheduling delays, poor communication, too many interview rounds, unclear expectations, and getting ghosted after investing real time in a process. Each one is a reason for a strong candidate to disengage before you ever get to make an offer.

Recruiter Friction

Interview scheduling, chasing hiring manager alignment, evaluating candidates consistently, reporting on pipeline health, and the sheer volume of administrative work that comes with running a modern hiring process. Scheduling alone eats up close to 38% of a recruiter’s week, according to GoodTime’s 2025 research.

Hiring Manager Friction

Inconsistent evaluations between interviewers, delayed feedback that stalls the whole pipeline, the logistics of coordinating multiple interviewers’ calendars, difficulty comparing candidates fairly, and scorecards that either don’t exist or don’t get filled out. Skills misalignment between what a role needs and what candidates in the pipeline actually offer is the single most common challenge cited by talent acquisition leaders, at 28%, according to GoodTime.

What High-Performing Hiring Teams Do Differently

They Hire Faster

Self-scheduling, automation, and better communication compress the calendar without cutting corners. Recruiters using a self-scheduling tool see an 84% reduction in time spent scheduling interviews, 33% more candidates interviewed by hiring managers, while 81% of their candidates schedule within 24 hours.

They Use Structured Hiring Practices

Scorecards, standardized interview questions, and consistent candidate evaluation are what makes hiring accurate. Frank Schmidt and John Hunter’s landmark meta-analysis of personnel selection research, still one of the most cited studies in the field, found that structured interviews predict job performance at a validity of about 0.51, compared with roughly 0.38 for unstructured interviews. That gap is the difference between an interview that adds signal and one that mostly adds noise.

They Improve Candidate Experience

Shorter interviews, flexible formats, and mobile-friendly processes aren’t just nice touches. CareerPlug’s research found that 66% of candidates said a positive experience directly influenced their decision to accept an offer, while 26% said a negative interview experience led them to decline one.

They Collaborate Better

Hiring manager alignment, centralized feedback, and shared visibility into the pipeline solve the single biggest complaint talent acquisition leaders report: candidates who look good on paper but don’t match what the role actually needs.

They Use AI Thoughtfully

Interview summaries, administrative automation, and hiring analytics free up recruiter time. Teams that use AI well save close to 20% of their work week, close to a full day, according to LinkedIn’s research. But adoption alone isn’t the same as impact. Only 37% of talent acquisition professionals report actually integrating generative AI into how they work day to day, even though far more have access to the tools. The advantage doesn’t go to whoever bought the software. It goes to whoever changed their process because of it.

The goal isn’t fewer human interactions. It’s more time for the ones that matter.

Hiring Trends by Industry

K-12 Education

At least 411,549 teaching positions nationwide were either unfilled or staffed by teachers without full certification during the 2025 school year, according to the Learning Policy Institute. The shortage isn’t evenly spread. Special education, science, math, and elementary education see the deepest, most persistent gaps, and districts increasingly lean on temporary certifications and substitute coverage to keep classrooms staffed while they recruit.

Healthcare

Registered nurse turnover climbed to 17.6% nationally in 2025, reversing a brief improvement the year before, according to NSI Nursing Solutions’ latest National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report. The average hospital now takes 56 to 102 days to recruit an experienced RN, averaging around 78 days. On the physician side, AAMC projects a shortage of up to 86,000 doctors nationwide by 2036. Burnout and retention, not just recruiting volume, are now the central hiring challenge in healthcare.

Government

Public sector hiring remains the slowest in the labor market. NEOGOV research puts the average time-to-hire for public sector roles at around 119 days, nearly four months. The federal government’s own 2025 Merit Hiring Plan set a target of just 80 days, which shows how far the starting point actually is. Once hired, though, public sector employees stay. Government has the lowest voluntary turnover rate of any major industry, at roughly 11%, according to BLS data.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers may need to fill as many as 3.8 million jobs between 2024 and 2033, and 1.9 million of those could go unfilled if the current skills gap continues, according to research from Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute. Talent acquisition is now the top challenge cited by manufacturing leaders, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Manufacturing Outlook. The workforce is also aging out faster than it’s being replaced, which is pushing manufacturers to recruit further outside their traditional candidate pool.

Retail

Retail’s annual turnover rate runs close to 60%, among the highest of any major industry, according to BLS data. High-volume, high-frequency hiring is simply the operating model here, which makes fast, mobile-friendly, low-friction applications far more valuable than they’d be in a role hired once every few years.

Hospitality

Hospitality turnover runs even higher than retail, at over 75% annually by some BLS-based estimates, the highest of any major sector tracked. Nearly two-thirds of hotels (65%) report ongoing staffing shortages, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Speed matters enormously here: one industry survey found 88% of hospitality job seekers expect to be interviewed within a week of applying. Seasonal spikes around holidays and travel peaks only add to the pressure.

Technology

Even with periodic layoffs making headlines, 65% of technology hiring managers say finding skilled talent is harder now than it was a year ago, according to Robert Half’s research, and 71% say skills shortages have already caused project delays. Remote and hybrid hiring remain the norm rather than the exception, and demand is shifting hard toward AI, machine learning, and security roles specifically.

Higher Education

Faculty hiring runs on a different clock than almost any other industry. Search committees made up of multiple faculty members, several layers of dean and provost approval, campus visits, and, for international candidates, visa processing routinely push a search past five months from posting to start date. Committee-based, consensus-driven hiring exists for good reasons (peer review, shared governance, legal defensibility), but it also means higher ed carries some of the longest hiring timelines of any sector.

Skilled Trades

The construction industry alone needs roughly 349,000 net new workers in 2026, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors. The bigger issue is what’s coming next: an estimated 41% of the current construction workforce is expected to retire by 2031, per NCCER data, taking decades of institutional knowledge with it. Mobile-friendly recruiting, quick response times, and meeting candidates where they already are matter enormously in a labor pool that skews toward hourly and field-based workers.

Professional Services

Professional and business services roles fill somewhat faster than the broader labor market. That relative speed hides real competition for experienced, specialized talent, especially where firms are competing directly with each other for the same small pool of candidates through campus recruiting and lateral hiring.

Nonprofits

Nearly half (46%) of staffed nonprofits reported employee vacancies in 2025, according to Urban Institute research. Salary competition is the most commonly cited barrier to recruiting and retention, followed by budget constraints, according to the National Council of Nonprofits’ national workforce survey. Nonprofits are increasingly competing on flexibility and mission instead of pay, since pay is often the one lever they can’t pull.

Hiring Myths to Leave Behind

The format was never the problem. A well-run video interview that respects a candidate’s time beats a badly run in-person process every time.

Teams using AI well are saving close to a full day of work a week. But most organizations have bought the tools without changing how they actually work. Access isn’t the same as advantage.

Structured interviews are both faster to run and more predictive of performance than unstructured ones. Speed and quality aren’t a tradeoff when the process itself is designed well.

The strongest candidates are typically off the market within about 10 days of becoming available. A slow, frustrating process doesn’t just annoy them. It loses them to whoever moved faster.

Self-scheduling, done well, cuts time-to-interview and no-show rates. The same technology, bolted onto a broken process, just makes the broken process faster.

Hiring Benchmarks That Matter

A word of caution on all of these: definitions vary by source, and industry context matters more than any single national average. A 25-day time-to-fill is excellent for a warehouse role and alarming for a VP of Engineering search. Use these as a starting point for comparison, not a universal target.

The Future of Hiring

The trends shaping hiring past 2026 are already visible: AI-assisted hiring, candidate self-scheduling, interview intelligence, structured hiring, internal mobility, skills-based hiring, recruiting automation, and better hiring analytics. Skills-based hiring in particular has picked up fast, reaching about 70% adoption among employers according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

What candidates want: speed, flexibility, transparency, accessibility, human interaction.

What recruiters want: efficiency, consistency, scalability, better insight into what’s actually working.

These lists are two views of the same process. The future belongs to hiring teams that deliver both.

Building Better Hiring Experiences in 2026

The highest-performing hiring teams share five habits:

1. They respect candidates’ time.
2. They hire faster without sacrificing quality.
3. They use technology to reduce friction.
4. They create more consistent hiring experiences across roles and teams.
5. They never lose the human element of hiring, even as more of the process becomes automated.

The organizations winning top talent in 2026 aren’t simply hiring faster or buying more software. They’re building hiring processes that work better for everyone involved: candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers alike. That’s a harder problem than speed alone, and it’s the one actually worth solving.

About interviewstream

interviewstream is an industry leading recruiting software company that helps you throughout every stage of the hiring process. Our customers have completed over 4 million interviews using interview on demand, interview scheduler, interview connect, AI Interview Summary, and interview insights – and we’d love to help you increase your hiring effectiveness and efficiency. Talk to an expert today to learn how to get started.