ManpowerGroup found 28% of employers hiring faster with AI and 30% hiring slower. Meanwhile Indeed reports more than half of Gen Z and millennial applicants quit mid-application, and applications per job are up 111% since 2022.
Key Takeaways
Every step of the hiring funnel now has an AI tool attached to it, and yet the funnel is not getting faster. Candidates use AI to apply in bulk, employers use AI to screen the flood, and both sides come away more tired than before. The data suggests HR is automating the volume without fixing the process that produces it.
The clearest scorecard comes from ManpowerGroup's Q4 2026 Employment Outlook Survey, released September 8 and covering 39,878 employers across 42 countries. Asked how their average time-to-hire compares with 2025, 28% said faster, 41% said about the same, and 30% said slower. The report itself concludes that "despite increasing use of AI across recruitment, employers are not yet seeing a universal improvement in time-to-hire." Slower is nearly as common as faster, which is hard to square with the promise that AI would compress the process.
Part of the problem is that speed was never the only constraint. HR Dive's coverage of the same survey lists the barriers employers keep naming: a shortage of candidates with the right skills, too few qualified local candidates, a mismatch between what candidates expect and what roles require, and fewer referrals from professional networks. None of those is solved by sorting résumés faster. An AI screener applied to a thin pool just reaches the bottom of that pool sooner.
The candidate experience shows what the funnel feels like from the other end. Indeed's State of the Job Seeker report, reported by HR Dive on September 29, surveyed more than 1,500 U.S. job seekers, both employed and unemployed. More than half of Gen Z and millennial applicants said they had stopped an application partway through, often because of its length and repetition. One Gen Z respondent applied to more than 90 jobs before landing an offer. Tyler Heidebrecht, a senior product marketing manager at Indeed, put it plainly: "Job seekers are fatigued, in part, because the mechanics of applying for a job can be very difficult."
The emotional read-out matters too. About half of respondents said they spend more energy convincing employers they are a fit than evaluating whether the employer is one for them, and 60% of Gen Z agreed they prioritize how an employer perceives them over mutual fit. That is a candidate pool optimizing for the screen, not for the job, which is exactly the behavior that makes screening less reliable.
Indeed's CEO, Hisayuki Idekoba, described the dynamic in a Fortune interview published September 21. Applications per job rose 111% between 2022 and 2025, while the number of recruiters fell 56%. When one opening draws more than 1,000 applications, he asked, "you think all 1,000 people are not qualified? Something's wrong." AI-generated applications inflate the volume, employers answer with more automated filtering, and qualified people get lost or ghosted, which pushes them to apply to even more roles. Each side's use of AI raises the cost for the other.
The fake-candidate problem makes it worse, because a recruiter who cannot trust an application has more reason to add screening steps, and each added step is another place an honest applicant gives up. We looked at that trust problem in our piece on fake candidates. The fix is not a smarter filter alone, it is a shorter, clearer path that an honest applicant will actually finish and a recruiter has time to read.
For HR and talent teams, the practical steps look like this:
Guide
Data-backed hiring practices that shorten decisions without raising mishire risk, a direct answer to applicants who quit long forms that ask for too much.
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Guide
Prompts for drafting clearer job descriptions and offer letters, a practical way to put AI on the employer side of the funnel instead of only filtering more applications.
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Guide
Frameworks for sourcing across countries and labor markets, relevant when the local pool is thin and faster screening only reaches the bottom of it sooner.
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Indeed's Job Postings Index turned positive year over year in September for the first time in nearly four years, but the US labor force has shrunk by around 700,000 workers in 2026. With quits at 1.9% and 2027 merit budgets holding at 3.1%, HR is competing for a smaller pool with the same money.
A 2026 Equifax survey of 353 HR professionals found 73% now encounter fabricated or misleading candidate information. Gartner projects one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028, and the FTC recorded job fraud losses rising 457% since 2020.
ManpowerGroup's Q4 2026 survey of 39,878 employers across 42 countries found hiring intentions climbing again, but 62% of employers adding staff say it's because the roles and skills they need are changing, not simple growth. Entry-level hiring is rebounding and AI is already cutting time-to-hire at nearly 3 in 10 companies.
