Q4 2026 HIRE Report
Q4 2026 HIRE Report
Quarterly Hiring Insights and Recruiting Environment (HIRE) Report by Advanced RPO
Executive Summary
As 2026 comes to a close, organizations are taking a closer look at what is working in their hiring strategies and where the process is creating friction.
Across the organizations we support, talent teams are navigating compensation expectations, reconsidering traditional job requirements, responding to changing workforce needs, and looking for ways to make hiring decisions with greater confidence. Candidates, meanwhile, are looking for more clarity around what a role requires, how compensation is determined, and what their experience will look like after they accept an offer.
The hiring process is becoming more connected to the employee experience.
In this issue, we explore how pay ranges can create uncertainty when they lack context, why skills-based hiring requires more than removing degree requirements, and how a more intentional onboarding experience can support retention from the start.
The details will look different from one organization to the next, but the opportunity is similar: create more clarity around the talent you need, align the people involved in hiring, and make sure the experience is consistent from the first interaction through the first months on the job.
Hiring is not just about filling an open role.
It is about making better decisions throughout the process.
Pam Verhoff
President and CEO, Advanced RPO
Hiring Insights
Your pay range may be raising more questions than it answers
Pay transparency was supposed to take the guesswork out of compensation. For many candidates, it hasn’t.
Picture two postings for the same role at the same company. Both have midpoints of $65,000. One lists a range of $55,000 to $75,000. The other lists $40,000 to $90,000.
Both postings are compliant, and both may be built on sound reasoning. But candidates only see the numbers, not the reasoning behind them. One gives a better estimate of where they will land, the other leaves a lot more up to the imagination.
Compliance asks whether you posted a range. Candidates are asking a different question: what will I actually be offered?
What the research shows
A 2026 study from Cornell University researchers, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, looked at this question from two angles.
First, they analyzed nearly 10 million U.S. job postings and found that wide ranges are common. Among postings that disclosed a range, the average spread was roughly $66,600.
Then they tested how candidates respond. In one experiment, nearly 1,000 working professionals chose between the two postings described above, received the same $65,000 offer, and decided how to respond. Together with the study’s other experiments, the results point to two core findings.
Uncertainty affects who applies. Candidates who were more uneasy with pay uncertainty gravitated toward narrower ranges. On average, that included more women than men, but the underlying driver was how candidates respond to risk.
The range sets the tone for the offer conversation. Candidates who chose the wider range were less satisfied with the same midpoint offer and more likely to push back. Those who chose the narrower range countered about $3,600 lower.
Our take: The range isn’t the problem. The silence around it is.
A range without context sends mixed signals. Some candidates just move on to a posting that gives more certainty. Others anchor expectations near the top, which turns a fair offer into a disappointing one. Neither outcome helps you hire.
The research points to a simple fix. When participants were told the typical starting salary and how final offers are determined, they saw the wide-range job as less risky, were more satisfied with the midpoint offer, and made more measured counteroffers. The gender gaps in application choices and counteroffers also disappeared.
The range didn’t change. The context around it did.
Ranges exist for legitimate reasons, including experience, geography, and internal leveling. The goal isn’t to narrow them. It’s to explain them.
How to make your pay range work harder
- Name the typical starting point. A line like “Typical starting pay is about $90,000; final offers reflect experience, skills, and role scope” gives candidates a realistic anchor.
- Align recruiters and hiring managers on how placement within the range is decided before the requisition opens.
- Say it early and say it consistently. Candidates shouldn’t hear one story in the posting, another in the phone screen, and a third at the offer.
Pay transparency laws determine what you have to publish. Your approach determines whether it actually helps.
Our expert’s advice
When we see a really wide range, it’s usually not a pay problem. It’s a scoping problem. The hiring team hasn’t agreed on whether they’re hiring a mid-level or senior person, so the range stretches to cover both, and candidates can feel that ambiguity. Before you debate how to word the posting, decide who you’re actually hiring and what that person is worth to you. The posting gets a lot easier after that.
Taylor Stillings,
Senior Recruiter, Advanced RPO
Skills-based hiring: Broad movement, narrow results
Few talent trends have been as widely embraced as skills-based hiring. Employers have rewritten job postings to focus on what candidates can do, dropping requirements for degrees, years of experience, and specific job titles. Most feel good about the shift. In a 2025 Resume Templates survey of hiring managers, 84% of companies that recently removed degree requirements called the move a success.
The hiring data tells a different story.
Degree requirements are the most closely tracked part of the movement, and the results are sobering. A study from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute estimated that dropping them created new opportunities for fewer than 1 in 700 hires. A 2026 follow-up from the Burning Glass Institute and OneTen, covering more than 1,000 major U.S. employers, found removing degree requirements raised the share of hires with non-degree credentials by just 2 percentage points.
Where the old requirements come back
Removing a requirement from a posting doesn’t remove it from the process. Interview forms still score familiar background markers. Hiring managers still see a traditional résumé as the safe choice. And recruiters, knowing which candidates are likely to be turned down, stop presenting them.
Employers changed what they ask for, but not what they want. In a 2026 Lumina Foundation and Gallup survey of 2,000 employers, about three-quarters said they prefer candidates with a degree, even for jobs that don’t formally require one.
Our take: Skills-based hiring is a foundation, not an edit
The organizations that see results don’t start with the posting. They rebuild the hiring process around skills from the ground up.
- Define the skills that matter. The business needs a clear, specific answer to what someone must be able to do in the role. Without it, “skills-based” defaults back to background.
- Find where those skills live. Research the adjacent roles, industries, military occupations, and training programs where people build those skills. That gives recruiters a real target instead of a wider net.
- Get hiring managers on board first. Agree on what a qualified candidate looks like and how their skills will be evaluated before the search opens. Recruiters source with confidence when they know those candidates will get a real shot.
- Write postings for the people you want to reach. Removing a requirement doesn’t help if the job title and description still read as if they were written for someone else. Many strong candidates never click on a role that sounds out of reach.
Each step depends on the one before it. Skip the foundation, and the posting change is all that’s left.
Skills-based hiring can widen your talent pool. But the change has to happen in how you define, find, and evaluate talent, not just in what you remove from the job ad.
Our expert’s advice
A job posting is the last thing you should change, not the first. Until the business can say exactly what skills a role needs and where people with those skills are coming from, a broader posting just creates a bigger pile for hiring managers to turn down. When recruiters know which pipelines to go after and that those candidates will get serious consideration, skills-based hiring starts to show up in the hires.
Bethany Cantrell,
Senior Recruiter, Advanced RPO
Onboarding for Retention: Stop Checking Boxes and Start Being Strategic
Retention does not start at the one-year mark, or even at the 90-day review. It starts on Day 1. New hires begin deciding whether they belong, whether their manager cares, and whether they made the right choice within the first few weeks. Most organizations are not doing enough to shape that experience.
Research shows that 86% of new hires decide to stay or leave within their first six months, with the earliest weeks carrying the most weight. Gallup estimates the real window may be even tighter, roughly 44 days before a disengaged new hire has mentally checked out. What happens inside that window is onboarding, and it is one of the most underused retention tools organizations have.
The gap between what companies think they are delivering and what employees actually experience is significant. Only 12% of employees say their organization onboards well. Nearly 30% of new hires leave within the first 90 days. Those numbers are connected. When onboarding fails to create clarity, connection, and confidence, early turnover becomes far more likely.
Organizations that close that gap tend to do two things consistently.
First, they involve the manager directly. When managers take an active role in onboarding, new hires are 3.4 times more likely to rate the experience as exceptional. Those exceptional experiences are what help convert new hires into employees who stay. A third of new hires say they simply wanted more guidance from their manager in the early weeks. That is not a structural fix. It is a behavioral one.
Second, they start before Day 1. Structured preboarding, clear communication between offer and start date, and early team connection reduce the uncertainty that causes new hires to reconsider. Employers that skip this step report that 65% have been ghosted by a candidate who accepted an offer and never showed up.
Structured onboarding programs improve new hire retention by 82%. That number is not about process for its own sake. It reflects what happens when a new hire arrives, feels supported, understands the role, and sees a path forward. The investment in recruiting is only protected when onboarding treats retention as the goal, not a checklist. The companies that get this right are not simply helping people start. They are giving them a reason to stay.
Our expert’s advice
Early turnover is often blamed on the employee hired, but many times it’s really a handoff problem. The experience promised during recruiting needs to match the experience delivered after acceptance. When those two moments are disconnected, retention risk increases and the organization may lose a great hire before they ever have a chance to succeed.
Paul Wolf,
Account Director, Advanced RPO
Recruiting Environment
Life Sciences
Articles we read
Manufacturing
Articles we read
Manufacturing Job Openings Surge 29%
SDC Executive
The Workforce Stabilization Trap
Manufacturers Alliance
Our expert’s advice
Manufacturing demand keeps outpacing hiring, and the challenge isn’t just finding applicants. Manufacturers are struggling to convert the candidates they have, technician demand is set to rise sharply, and stable-looking turnover numbers are hiding real losses to local competitors. The organizations making progress are tightening their hiring process, looking to adjacent industries for transferable skills, and treating the first 90 days as seriously as the search itself.
Justin King
Solution Design Director, Advanced RPO
Food & Beverage
Articles we read
In Food Plants, AI and Automation Are Filling Roles Nobody Can Staff
Food Industry Executive
Shifts in Training Are Mandatory for Battling the Workforce Gap
Food Engineering
Our expert’s advice
Food and beverage is projected to add more jobs than any other manufacturing sector over the next decade, but demand was never the constraint. Plants are automating the roles nobody applies for, which raises the skill bar for everyone who remains, and an estimated 95% of manufacturers already struggle to find qualified operators and technicians. Meanwhile, retiring workers are taking hard-won process knowledge with them. The companies that come out ahead will shorten the path from hire to productive, capture that knowledge before it walks out, and sell these roles as careers rather than jobs.
Tim Oyer
Vice President, Advanced RPO
Looking Ahead to Q1 2027
Next up: making the 2027 hiring plan work
Planning for 2027 is already underway for many talent acquisition teams. Hiring priorities are being set, workforce needs are coming into focus, and business leaders are looking at where they will need talent most.
But a hiring plan is only useful if the organization can execute against it.
That means looking beyond projected headcount and asking whether the hiring process is built to support those plans. Do teams agree on the talent they need? Are job requirements helping or getting in the way? Are candidates getting enough clarity to make informed decisions? And does the experience continue to hold up after the hire is made?
These questions matter because hiring challenges rarely exist in isolation. A difficult-to-fill role may point to unclear requirements. A narrow talent pool may reflect outdated expectations. Early turnover may start with a disconnect between what was promised during recruiting and what a new hire experiences on the job.
As organizations head into 2027, the opportunity is to look at those connections more closely.
The goal is not to build a more complicated hiring process. It is to build one that is clear, aligned, and flexible enough to support the business as needs change.
The strongest hiring strategies are built to move with the business.
For more information about any of these topics or to learn more about how an RPO partner can help you reach your hiring goals, please contact us.
Subscribe
Get updates and new content delivered right to your inbox. Unsubscribe anytime.
Featured resource
2026 Recruitment Scorecard
Jumpstart your talent acquisition improvement plan with an 8-step recruiting program evaluation.