Employers plan to keep hiring into the final quarter of 2026, but ManpowerGroup’s latest global survey shows the growth is increasingly about swapping in new skills, not simply adding headcount.
What happened
ManpowerGroup’s Q4 2026 Employment Outlook Survey of 39,878 employers across 42 countries puts the Global Net Employment Outlook at 29%, up two points from the prior quarter. Forty-three percent of employers plan to add staff between October and December against 14% expecting cuts. Among those adding headcount, 62% cite changing roles and skills, not expansion alone, as the primary driver, and entry-level hiring is holding up: 45% of employers report increasing early-career hiring compared with 2025, versus 20% pulling back.
Why it matters for the HR leader
“This data demonstrates employers continue to place high value on human skills, even as the nature of work shifts with technological advancements,” said Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup Chair and CEO. “Nearly two-thirds of employers tell us they are hiring because the roles and skills their organizations need are changing; many are reconsidering the tasks within jobs rather than displacing full positions.” That reframes workforce planning: headcount targets are less useful than skills-gap maps when a third of new hires are backfilling roles that have quietly changed shape.
The original insight
The survey’s most telling number may be the one that did not move: only 28% of employers say time-to-hire has gotten faster since 2025, despite widening AI adoption in recruiting, as HRTech Edition has tracked in HR platforms’ push to become AI’s data moat. Prising called the next five years a challenge of “redesigning work at scale,” which suggests AI is changing what roles need to exist before it meaningfully speeds up how fast they get filled, a sequencing problem most workforce-planning tools are not yet built to model. HRTech Edition’s own read on AI’s effect on managerial judgment points to the same lag between adoption and measurable speed.
Source: ManpowerGroup
