Recruitment Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: David Park | Last updated: August 19, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
American employers held 7.4 million open jobs in June 2026 and filled 5.3 million positions that month. That works out to 72.7 hires for every 100 openings — down from 87.2 across 2015–2019 and from 119.8 in 2001. According to Axis Intelligence Research, recruitment funnels are now converting demand into headcount less efficiently than at any point in the 26 years of records.
Quick Answer
There were 7,359,000 job openings and 5,348,000 hires in the United States in June 2026, a job openings rate of 4.4% and a hires rate of 3.4%, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS release published August 4, 2026. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Recruitment Friction Index (RFI) reached 115.3 in the first half of 2026 against a 2015–2019 base of 100 — the highest annual reading since the series begins in 2001. The euro area job vacancy rate stood at 2.3% in Q1 2026 and UK vacancies at 707,000 in May–July 2026.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, U.S. employers produced 72.7 hires per 100 job openings in June 2026, 16.7% below the 2015–2019 average of 87.2 hires per 100 openings.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Recruitment Friction Index reached 115.3 in the first half of 2026, the highest annual reading in a series running from 2001 — though close enough to 2024’s 115.0 that the honest reading is a four-year plateau rather than a fresh spike.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, federal government recruiting converts openings into hires at 20.1 hires per 100 openings — the weakest yield of any segment JOLTS publishes, against 105.9 in construction.
- The U.S. job openings rate of 4.4% in June 2026 was 1.9 times the euro area job vacancy rate of 2.3% recorded by Eurostat for Q1 2026, an Axis Intelligence Research comparison using the two agencies’ shared rate formula.
- UK vacancies stood at 707,000 in May to July 2026, which the Office for National Statistics reports is 81,000 (10.3%) below the pre-pandemic January–March 2020 level, with small employers of 1–9 staff accounting for the steepest annual fall at 16.1%.
How Many Job Openings and Hires Are There in the United States in 2026?
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey is the closest thing recruiting has to a national scoreboard, and the June 2026 edition reads flat. Openings were little changed at 7.4 million, hires unchanged at 5.3 million, separations at 5.4 million. Quits held at 3.2 million and layoffs at 1.8 million.
Flat is the story. The market that produced 12.3 million openings in March 2022 now produces 7.4 million — a 40.2% decline — while hires have fallen 22.6% from their November 2021 peak of 6.9 million.
U.S. recruitment headline metrics, June 2026
| Metric | Level | Rate | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job openings | 7,359,000 | 4.4% | BLS JOLTS, June 2026 |
| Hires | 5,348,000 | 3.4% | BLS JOLTS, June 2026 |
| Total separations | 5,400,000 | 3.4% | BLS JOLTS, June 2026 |
| Quits | 3,200,000 | 2.0% | BLS JOLTS, June 2026 |
| Layoffs and discharges | 1,800,000 | 1.1% | BLS JOLTS, June 2026 |
| Other separations | 353,000 | — | BLS JOLTS, June 2026 |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, June 2026 (USDL-26-1289). Seasonally adjusted. Retrieved August 19, 2026.
Month-to-month movement was concentrated in two industries. Openings rose in transportation, warehousing and utilities (+97,000) and in federal government (+39,000), and fell in wholesale trade (−74,000), nondurable goods manufacturing (−55,000) and mining and logging (−9,000).
David Park: Recruiting leaders reading a flat JOLTS print tend to conclude nothing happened. Something did. A requisition board holding steady at 7.4 million openings while hires hold steady at 5.3 million is a board where the same postings are sitting there month after month. Stability in the aggregate is churn suppression underneath it — fewer people entering the funnel, fewer offers going out, longer time-to-fill on everything that isn’t front-line.
What Is the Recruitment Friction Index (RFI) and Why Is It at a Record High?
Vacancy counts tell you how much demand exists. They say nothing about whether employers can act on it. So Axis Intelligence Research built a composite that measures the resistance in the system rather than its size.
RFI — Recruitment Friction Index. A single reading of how hard it is to move an open requisition to a signed offer, relative to the last stable pre-pandemic expansion.
Formula. All three inputs are drawn from a single survey (JOLTS), so the methodologies are compatible and no cross-survey blending occurs:
RFI = 100 × [ 0.45 × (HYR_base ÷ HYR_t) + 0.30 × (HiresRate_base ÷ HiresRate_t) + 0.25 × (QuitsRate_base ÷ QuitsRate_t) ]
Base period. 2015–2019 annual means: HYR 87.15 hires per 100 openings, hires rate 3.760%, quits rate 2.157%. Each ratio is inverted so a deteriorating input raises the reading. The index averaged 100.3 across the base period by construction.
Inputs and weights.
| Component | What it captures | Weight | 2026 H1 value | Ratio to base | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hiring yield (HYR) | Conversion of open roles into hires | 45% | 72.58 per 100 | 1.2006 | 54.0 pts |
| Hiring flow (hires rate) | Volume of hiring against employment | 30% | 3.333% | 1.1280 | 33.8 pts |
| Candidate mobility (quits rate) | Willingness of workers to change jobs | 25% | 1.967% | 1.0966 | 27.4 pts |
| RFI | 100% | 115.3 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research calculation on BLS JOLTS series JTSJOL, JTSHIL, JTSHIR and JTSQUR retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 2026 value covers January–June 2026.
Reading the scale. 100 is the 2015–2019 norm. Below 95, requisitions clear quickly and candidates move freely. 95–105 is normal-market friction. 105–112 is a tightening funnel. Above 112, all three mechanisms — yield, flow and mobility — are simultaneously degraded, which is where the market has sat since 2022.
Recruitment Friction Index, annual readings 2001–2026
| Year | HYR | Hires rate | Quits rate | RFI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 119.8 | 3.96% | 2.21% | 85.7 |
| 2005 | 129.3 | 3.97% | 2.11% | 84.3 |
| 2007 | 113.4 | 3.86% | 2.09% | 89.6 |
| 2009 | 155.8 | 2.98% | 1.34% | 103.3 |
| 2012 | 115.8 | 3.31% | 1.53% | 103.1 |
| 2015 | 93.8 | 3.67% | 1.97% | 100.0 |
| 2017 | 89.3 | 3.73% | 2.16% | 99.2 |
| 2019 | 81.5 | 3.87% | 2.32% | 100.5 |
| 2021 | 63.7 | 4.34% | 2.71% | 107.5 |
| 2022 | 57.3 | 4.20% | 2.76% | 114.9 |
| 2023 | 63.3 | 3.76% | 2.37% | 114.8 |
| 2024 | 70.2 | 3.42% | 2.07% | 115.0 |
| 2025 | 74.1 | 3.32% | 2.02% | 113.7 |
| 2026 (H1) | 72.6 | 3.33% | 1.97% | 115.3 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research; underlying series U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED. Full 26-year series in the accompanying CSV. Retrieved August 19, 2026.
Two features of this series deserve attention because they cut against the obvious reading.
The first: 2009 registers 103.3, well below 2026. The recession year had brutal hiring flow — a 2.98% hires rate, the worst in the series — but a hiring yield of 155.8, because openings collapsed faster than hires did. Employers who did post roles filled them. Today’s friction has the opposite shape: demand exists and stays unconverted.
The second: 2022’s 114.9, 2023’s 114.8, 2024’s 115.0, 2025’s 113.7 and 2026’s 115.3 sit inside a 1.6-point band. Calling 2026 a record is technically correct and analytically misleading. What the data shows is a four-year plateau averaging 114.7 — a structural resetting of how recruitment works, not a deterioration still in progress.
David Park: The composition shift is what should worry a talent acquisition function planning 2027 headcount. In 2022 the friction came from candidate scarcity — everyone was quitting, offers got countered, comp bands broke. In 2026 the same index level comes from the reverse: a 1.97% quits rate, the lowest full-period average since 2013, means the internal-referral and passive-candidate channels that used to feed the top of the funnel have gone quiet. Same score, opposite problem, completely different playbook.
How Many Hires Does It Take 100 Job Openings to Produce?
HYR — Hiring Yield Ratio. The number of hires an employer segment completes in a month for every 100 job openings it holds. Formula: HYR = (hires level ÷ job openings level) × 100, both seasonally adjusted, same month, same JOLTS industry definition.
An HYR of 100 means a segment converts its entire posted board within a month. Above 100 means hiring runs ahead of the openings stock — typical of high-turnover work where roles are filled and refilled continuously. Below 60 means most postings persist unfilled through the month.
Nationally, HYR was 72.7 in June 2026 against 74.0 in June 2025. Neither figure is anywhere near the 2001–2007 range of 113–147.
Hiring Yield Ratio by industry, June 2026
| Industry | Job openings (000s) | Hires (000s) | HYR | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Construction | 305 | 323 | 105.9 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Accommodation and food services | 684 | 715 | 104.5 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Leisure and hospitality | 830 | 858 | 103.4 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Mining and logging | 20 | 20 | 100.0 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Information | 90 | 81 | 90.0 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Retail trade | 774 | 652 | 84.2 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Professional and business services | 1,304 | 1,085 | 83.2 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Other services | 281 | 232 | 82.6 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Transportation, warehousing, utilities | 392 | 316 | 80.6 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Manufacturing | 481 | 329 | 68.4 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Durable goods manufacturing | 345 | 209 | 60.6 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Health care and social assistance | 1,347 | 701 | 52.0 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Finance and insurance | 303 | 133 | 43.9 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| State and local, excluding education | 417 | 145 | 34.8 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
| Federal government | 139 | 28 | 20.1 | BLS JOLTS Tables 1 & 2 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research calculation on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS Table 1 and Table 2, June 2026, seasonally adjusted. Retrieved August 19, 2026. Full 31-segment table in the CSV.
The spread is the finding. Accommodation and food services converts openings at 104.5; finance and insurance at 43.9 — a 2.4× gap between two sectors operating in the same national labor market on the same day.
Federal government at 20.1 is the outlier that most deserves press attention. Federal openings rose 39,000 in June to 139,000, a job openings rate of 4.9%, while federal hires fell 6,000 to 28,000. Demand went up; conversion went down.
David Park: Anyone who has run a requisition through a structured hiring process recognises the pattern in that bottom cluster. Finance, health care, state and local government and federal all share the same characteristics: credential gates, background and licensure checks, multi-panel approvals, and comp bands set by policy rather than by market. Those controls exist for defensible reasons. The measurable cost is that a posted role in finance and insurance takes roughly two and a half times as long to convert as the identical stock of postings in hospitality. If you are benchmarking your time-to-fill against a national average, you are benchmarking against a number that mixes both of these worlds and describes neither.
Hiring Yield Ratio by U.S. region, June 2026
| Region | Job openings (000s) | Hires (000s) | HYR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midwest | 1,474 | 1,173 | 79.6 |
| Northeast | 1,194 | 932 | 78.1 |
| South | 2,856 | 2,025 | 70.9 |
| West | 1,836 | 1,219 | 66.4 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research calculation on BLS JOLTS Tables 1 and 2, June 2026, seasonally adjusted.
The West carries 1.8 million openings — more than any region except the South — and converts them least efficiently. Its openings rate of 4.7% is the highest in the country while its hires rate of 3.3% is the joint lowest.
How Do U.S. Recruitment Conditions Compare With Europe and the UK?
Cross-border recruitment comparisons usually fail because agencies measure different things. This one works, with a caveat stated plainly: BLS and Eurostat use the same arithmetic. The JOLTS job openings rate and the Eurostat job vacancy rate are both computed as vacancies divided by occupied posts plus vacancies. The residual differences are coverage and seasonal adjustment, not formula.
On that basis, according to Axis Intelligence Research, the U.S. job openings rate of 4.4% in June 2026 ran 1.9 times the euro area rate of 2.3% and 2.1 times the EU-27 rate of 2.1% for Q1 2026.
Vacancy rates across major markets
| Market | Vacancy / openings rate | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 4.4% | June 2026 | BLS JOLTS |
| Netherlands | 4.0% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Belgium | 3.4% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Malta | 3.3% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Austria | 3.1% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Germany | 2.7% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Euro area (EA21) | 2.3% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| France | 2.2% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat (restricted coverage) |
| European Union (EU27) | 2.1% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Italy | 1.9% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat (restricted coverage) |
| Ireland | 1.1% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Spain | 0.9% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Poland | 0.8% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
| Romania | 0.6% | Q1 2026 | Eurostat |
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS (seasonally adjusted, total nonfarm); Eurostat Euro indicators release 3-16062026-AP (not seasonally adjusted, NACE Rev. 2.1 sections B–T). France and Italy data are not strictly comparable per Eurostat country notes: public administration is not surveyed and public institutions are not fully covered in education and health. Retrieved August 19, 2026.
Direction of travel diverges from level. Euro area vacancy rates ticked up from 2.2% in Q4 2025 to 2.3% in Q1 2026, but against Q1 2025 they fell in 16 member states, held stable in 8 and rose in only 3 — Malta (+0.4 pp), Portugal and Slovenia (both +0.2 pp). The largest annual falls were Belgium (−0.7 pp) and Austria (−0.5 pp).
Where the demand sits is instructive for anyone running a European sourcing desk. The euro area’s highest vacancy rates by sector are administrative and support services, which includes temporary employment agencies, at 3.2%; accommodation and food services at 3.2%; construction at 3.1%; and telecommunications, computer programming and IT services at 2.8%. Manufacturing sits at 1.6% and publishing and content production at 1.4%.
The UK is the clearest deterioration in the group. ONS put vacancies at 707,000 for May to July 2026, down 19,000 (2.7%) year on year and 81,000 (10.3%) below the January–March 2020 level. Outside the pandemic, the last time UK vacancies were at or below 707,000 was September to November 2014. There were 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy in April to June 2026, a ratio that has held at 2.5 since July–September 2025.
Small employers are carrying that fall. Vacancies at UK businesses with 1 to 9 employees dropped 18,000 (16.1%) over the year to 95,000 — outside the pandemic, the lowest for that size band since January–March 2014. ONS reports feedback from its Vacancy Survey that some firms are not recruiting because of increases in labour costs and other operating expenses.
David Park: The small-employer collapse is the number a recruitment marketplace should be modelling against, because sub-10-headcount firms are the volume customers for job boards and low-touch ATS products. Losing 16.1% of that vacancy pool in twelve months is a revenue event, not a macro footnote. Larger UK employers held their vacancy levels roughly flat over the same period.
Are Workers Still Changing Jobs? Quits and Candidate Mobility in 2026
The quits rate is the recruiter’s supply signal. When people leave jobs voluntarily, they become candidates for someone else’s requisition; when they stay put, the passive-candidate pool empties.
Quits ran at 2.0% in June 2026 — 3.2 million people. The 2026 first-half average of 1.97% is below every full-year reading since 2013 and well under the 2022 peak year of 2.76%.
| Year | Quits rate (annual mean) | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 1.34% | Recession floor |
| 2013 | 1.68% | Slow recovery |
| 2019 | 2.32% | Late-cycle mobility |
| 2022 | 2.76% | Series peak |
| 2024 | 2.07% | Normalising |
| 2026 (H1) | 1.97% | Below pre-pandemic norm |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research annual means of BLS JOLTS series JTSQUR, seasonally adjusted, retrieved from FRED. Retrieved August 19, 2026.
Layoffs are not driving this. The layoffs and discharges rate held at 1.1% in June 2026, which by historical standards is low. Employers are neither shedding staff nor hiring them; workers are neither being pushed out nor choosing to leave. Axis Intelligence Research treats the combination of a 2.0% quits rate and a 1.1% layoff rate as the defining condition of the 2026 recruitment market — a low-separation, low-hire equilibrium in which almost nothing moves.
For a talent acquisition team, a suppressed quits rate has a specific operational consequence. Sourcing pipelines built on passive outreach convert worse, because the population willing to entertain a move has shrunk. Internal mobility and referral programmes carry more of the load. And the candidates who do respond are disproportionately those already at risk in their current role, which changes the quality distribution of an inbound pipeline in ways that offer-acceptance rates will not reveal until the second interview stage.
How Widely Are Employers Using AI in Recruiting, and What Does the Law Now Require?
Employer AI adoption is broad enough that recruiting technology decisions are no longer a niche procurement question. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 19.8% of U.S. businesses were using AI in a business function as of May 3, 2026, with adoption strongly concentrated by size: 37% of firms with 250 or more employees, 32% of firms with 100 to 249 employees, and under 20% of firms with four or fewer employees.
Two sectors run well ahead of the national rate — information at 39.7% and finance and insurance at 33.9% — while retail trade sits at roughly 14%. The Business Trends and Outlook Survey’s second AI supplement measures use across 15 business functions including human resources, though the cited release does not publish a recruiting-specific adoption rate. Axis Intelligence Research records that figure as not published rather than estimating it.
The regulatory position moved faster than the adoption data. Illinois Public Act 103-0804 took effect January 1, 2026, amending the Illinois Human Rights Act. It makes two things civil rights violations for employers with respect to recruitment, hiring, promotion, renewal of employment, selection for training or apprenticeship, discharge, discipline, tenure and the terms and conditions of employment:
- Using artificial intelligence that has the effect of subjecting employees to discrimination on the basis of protected classes, or using zip codes as a proxy for protected classes.
- Failing to provide notice to an employee that the employer is using artificial intelligence for those purposes.
The statute defines artificial intelligence broadly — a machine-based system that infers from input how to generate predictions, content, recommendations or decisions — and expressly includes generative AI. The Illinois Department of Human Rights is directed to adopt rules covering the circumstances requiring notice, the time period for providing it and the means of delivery.
David Park: The zip code provision is the one that will catch teams by surprise, and it has nothing to do with whether a vendor markets its product as AI. Location-based scoring is embedded in commute-distance filters, “likelihood to accept” models and candidate-ranking features that most talent acquisition functions treat as routine ATS configuration. If a system ranks applicants using geography and that geography correlates with a protected class, the Illinois statute reaches it. Ask the vendor for the feature list, not the marketing deck.
Related Axis Intelligence Research coverage: AI job displacement statistics covers the labour demand side of automation, tech layoffs statistics covers involuntary separations in technology employment, Gen Z employment statistics covers entry-level hiring conditions, and cybersecurity jobs statistics covers one of the tightest specialist recruitment markets, HR statistics. The full catalogue sits in the Axis Intelligence statistics library.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this report comes from a document fetched and read on August 19, 2026. Source organisations: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (JOLTS news release USDL-26-1289 and Tables 1 and 2); BLS JOLTS series JTSJOL, JTSHIL, JTSHIR and JTSQUR retrieved through FRED at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Eurostat Euro indicators release 3-16062026-AP; the UK Office for National Statistics Vacancies and jobs in the UK: August 2026 bulletin; the U.S. Census Bureau Business Trends and Outlook Survey; and the Illinois General Assembly text of Public Act 103-0804. No secondary aggregator supplied a value.
Hiring Yield Ratio (HYR). HYR = (hires level ÷ job openings level) × 100. Both inputs are seasonally adjusted JOLTS levels for the same month and the same industry, regional or national definition. Annual readings are computed as the mean monthly hires level divided by the mean monthly openings level for that year, then multiplied by 100 — not as the mean of monthly ratios. The 2026 annual figure covers January to June.
Recruitment Friction Index (RFI). RFI = 100 × [0.45 × (HYR_base ÷ HYR_t) + 0.30 × (HiresRate_base ÷ HiresRate_t) + 0.25 × (QuitsRate_base ÷ QuitsRate_t)]. Base values are the 2015–2019 annual means: HYR 87.15, hires rate 3.760%, quits rate 2.157%. Weights reflect the analytical priority of conversion efficiency over volume and volume over mobility; they are fixed and are not re-fitted between readings. The index averaged 100.3 over the base period. Every input is a JOLTS series, so no cross-survey blending occurs.
Worked example, first half of 2026. HYR 72.58, hires rate 3.333%, quits rate 1.967%. Yield ratio 87.15 ÷ 72.58 = 1.2006, contributing 45 × 1.2006 = 54.03 points. Flow ratio 3.760 ÷ 3.333 = 1.1280, contributing 30 × 1.1280 = 33.84 points. Mobility ratio 2.157 ÷ 1.967 = 1.0966, contributing 25 × 1.0966 = 27.42 points. Total: 115.28, reported as 115.3.
Cross-market comparison. The JOLTS job openings rate and the Eurostat job vacancy rate share a denominator definition — vacancies divided by occupied posts plus vacancies — which is why Axis Intelligence Research publishes the ratio between them. Reference periods differ (June 2026 versus Q1 2026), JOLTS is seasonally adjusted while the Eurostat quarterly rates are not, and coverage differs: JOLTS covers total nonfarm while Eurostat covers NACE Rev. 2.1 sections B–T. France and Italy exclude public administration and do not fully cover public education and health. UK vacancy levels are reported as levels rather than rates because ONS is mid-transition to a new job openings rate methodology, with both old and new published in dataset VACS02 through September 2026.
Scope note. JOLTS counts job openings as positions open on the last business day of the month for which the employer is actively recruiting and could start within 30 days. It does not count job advertisements, so a single opening advertised on six platforms is one opening. HYR and RFI therefore describe employer-side conversion, not applicant-side competition.
Revisions. May 2026 JOLTS openings were revised down 57,000 to 7.5 million, hires revised up 82,000 to 5.3 million, and total separations revised up 159,000 to 5.3 million. Eurostat revised the Q4 2025 vacancy rate up 0.1 pp for both the euro area and the EU compared with the 18 March 2026 release. The ONS 95% confidence interval on the three-month average vacancies level is approximately ±32,000, and its Vacancy Survey response rate was 75.6% in July 2026.
About This Dataset
recruitment-statistics-2026.csv contains 322 observations covering U.S. job openings, hires, quits, layoffs and separations; the full 2001–2026 Recruitment Friction Index and Hiring Yield Ratio series; hiring yield for 31 U.S. industry, government and regional segments; Eurostat job vacancy rates for 27 European markets and 14 NACE sections; UK vacancy levels and size-band detail; U.S. business AI adoption rates; and the Illinois AI employment notice statute effective date.
Every row carries source organisation, source document, source URL, retrieval date, a primary-source flag, an Axis-calculated flag and — where a value is computed — the method note reproducing the formula. Values not published by the underlying source are recorded as NA with a not_published data type rather than estimated.
Temporal coverage: December 2000 – July 2026. Spatial coverage: United States, European Union 27, euro area, United Kingdom.
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Free to use, redistribute and build on, including commercially, with attribution.
How to Cite This Research
APA Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Recruitment statistics 2026: Hiring yield, job vacancies and the Recruitment Friction Index. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/recruitment-statistics/
MLA Axis Intelligence Research. “Recruitment Statistics 2026: Hiring Yield, Job Vacancies and the Recruitment Friction Index.” Axis Intelligence, 19 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/recruitment-statistics/.
Chicago Axis Intelligence Research. “Recruitment Statistics 2026: Hiring Yield, Job Vacancies and the Recruitment Friction Index.” Axis Intelligence. August 19, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/recruitment-statistics/.
Dataset citation Axis Intelligence Research, Recruitment Statistics 2026 Dataset, 2026. CC BY 4.0.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a falling job openings count mean recruiters are hiring less, or just posting less?
Both, but not equally. Openings fell 40.2% from the March 2022 peak of 12.3 million to 7.4 million in June 2026 while hires fell 22.6% from their November 2021 peak. Postings contracted faster than hiring did, which is why the Hiring Yield Ratio has recovered from its 2022 trough of 57.3 to 72.6 without the market feeling any easier. Fewer requisitions chasing a similarly slow conversion process still produces a slow conversion process.
Why does the Hiring Yield Ratio exceed 100 in construction and hospitality?
Because hires and openings measure different things. Openings are a stock counted on the last business day of the month; hires are a flow counted across the whole month. In high-turnover work, a single opening can be filled, vacated and refilled within one month, producing more hires than the end-of-month openings stock. Construction posted 105.9 and accommodation and food services 104.5 in June 2026 for that reason. It signals rapid recycling, not surplus supply.
What does a Recruitment Friction Index reading above 112 actually mean for a hiring plan?
It means all three mechanisms are degraded simultaneously — openings convert poorly, hiring volume is depressed relative to employment, and workers are unwilling to move. A plan built on the 2015–2019 norm of roughly 100 will under-forecast time-to-fill and over-forecast pipeline yield from passive sourcing. The four-year plateau at an average of 114.7 suggests planning against the current level rather than a return to baseline.
Is federal government hiring genuinely broken, or is 20.1 a measurement artefact?
The figure is real arithmetic on published data: 28,000 federal hires against 139,000 federal openings in June 2026. It is a single month for a comparatively small segment, so month-to-month volatility is larger than for total nonfarm. The direction is unambiguous, though — federal openings rose 39,000 in the month while federal hires fell 6,000. State and local government excluding education sits at 34.8, so the pattern is broader than one agency’s staffing cycle.
Can U.S. JOLTS openings be compared with European vacancy rates without distorting either?
The rates can, because both are computed as vacancies over occupied posts plus vacancies. The levels cannot, because the surveyed populations differ in size and industrial coverage. Axis Intelligence Research publishes the U.S.–euro area ratio of 1.91 for that reason, with the reference-period and seasonal-adjustment differences stated alongside it rather than smoothed away.
Why is the quits rate a recruitment metric rather than a retention metric?
Because one employer’s attrition is every other employer’s candidate supply. At a 1.97% quits rate — below every full-year reading since 2013 — the pool of people actively willing to change jobs has shrunk, which raises sourcing cost per hire even when applicant volume looks healthy. Retention teams read the quits rate as good news; sourcing teams should read the same number as a supply constraint.
What does the Illinois AI law require of an employer that uses a third-party ATS?
Public Act 103-0804 places the obligation on the employer, not the vendor. If artificial intelligence influences recruitment, hiring, promotion, training selection, discharge, discipline or terms of employment, the employer must notify the employee, and must not use AI that has a discriminatory effect on protected classes or use zip codes as a proxy for them. The statute’s definition of AI is broad enough to cover ranking and scoring features that vendors may not label as AI. The Illinois Department of Human Rights is directed to issue rules on the timing and means of notice.
Which UK employers are cutting vacancies hardest?
Businesses with 1 to 9 employees. Their vacancies fell 18,000 (16.1%) over the year to 95,000 in May–July 2026 — outside the pandemic, the lowest for that band since January–March 2014. ONS reports Vacancy Survey feedback that increases in labour costs and other operating expenses are behind some firms’ decision not to recruit. Vacancies fell in 11 of 18 industry sectors on the year, with human health and social work activities down 11,000 (8.5%).
How often are these figures updated, and what triggers a revision?
The Recruitment Friction Index and Hiring Yield Ratio are recomputed on each monthly BLS JOLTS release; the next is scheduled for September 1, 2026, covering July 2026. European figures update on the Eurostat quarterly cycle, next on September 15, 2026. UK figures update monthly, next on September 15, 2026. Because BLS revises JOLTS levels with each release and rebenchmarks annually with the January data, prior index readings are restated rather than frozen.