Technology always comes with a tradeoff. It makes things faster and easier, but it also creates new problems we didn’t have before. AI is starting to show that pattern. Over the past year, the internet has been flooded with what people are calling “AI slop.” Scroll through Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube ads, and you’ll see it everywhere. Generic images, strange videos, and low-effort content clearly designed to game algorithms rather than inform people.

Now the same thing is happening in hiring. Tools like LazyApply and AI Hawk allow job seekers to automatically submit hundreds of applications at once. Applicant Tracking Systems are getting flooded with automated submissions, making it harder for recruiters to find real candidates in the noise.

Robbie Simpson recently wrote a great piece about how recruiters are starting to fight back and block these tools from flooding the system.

Events for You:

The job market is entering a strange new phase. It is not collapsing or booming either. It is simply slowing down. The February jobs report showed the worst monthly job losses since the pandemic. Headlines focused on strikes and government employment fluctuations. Those factors explain part of the decline. They do not explain the bigger shift.

The largest declines came from a few specific industries. Healthcare saw some of the biggest losses, driven largely by a major strike that temporarily pulled tens of thousands of workers off payrolls. Manufacturing also shed jobs, reflecting weaker demand and ongoing adjustments across supply chains that have been recalibrating since the pandemic boom. Construction employment slipped as well, partly due to severe winter weather that paused projects across several regions of the country. Transportation and logistics showed modest declines as companies continued adjusting staffing levels after the surge in demand during the e-commerce expansion of the early 2020s.

Hiring is slowing while layoffs remain relatively low. Economists sometimes call this a “low-hiring, low-firing” environment. That phrase sounds boring, but in reality, it changes how careers move. For the past few years, the job market strongly rewarded mobility. Workers who switched jobs often secured higher salaries, better titles, or faster career progression. At the same time, companies expanded their teams rapidly as they worked to recover from the talent shortages that followed the pandemic, creating an environment where moving between roles became one of the easiest ways to advance.

That strategy becomes much harder when hiring begins to slow. In a low-hiring environment, companies tend to hold on to the employees they already have while quietly pausing expansion plans. Managers delay requests for new headcount, recruiters open far fewer roles, and the number of available job listings begins to shrink. As opportunities narrow, many professionals choose to stay where they are, not necessarily because they want to, but because moving to a new role suddenly carries more risk than it did before.

Skills tied directly to business outcomes also become more valuable. When hiring slows, companies focus less on interesting roles and more on people who can solve clear operational problems. This kind of market forces professionals to think more strategically about their careers. Periods like this often produce the most resilient careers. When opportunities are everywhere, many people drift upward without much planning.

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We’re taking a second dive at Robert Half’s 2026 Tech and IT Hiring Trends report and this time we focus on headcount as a function of company size and hiring projections into 2028. This report includes survey responses from industry leaders and decision-makers.

Across small, medium, and large-sized businesses, leaders consistently note that they are not fully staffed for business needs. Only 12% of leaders at small companies reported being fully staffed, and that’s twice the rate of large companies!

Perhaps this is an encouraging sign for the labor markets in the next two years. There’s an admission by many decision-makers that more hiring needs to be done. Over half of leaders at medium and large companies surveyed for the report expect hiring to increase over the next two years. On the other hand, approximately 25% of leaders project a decrease in headcount. 

Complicating the matter is that over half of business leaders reported difficulty in finding skilled talent as compared to the year prior. 65% reported that AI-generated applications were making evaluating talent more difficult because of increased numbers of applications from unqualified applications and difficulty in separating inauthentic resumes from the applicant pool.

One big takeaway from this data for jobseekers is to intentionally diversify the size of companies to which they apply for jobs. From this data, we at Cocoon Careers generally recommend having at least 50% of your job applications directed towards roles at large and medium-sized companies. Optimally, that percentage should be closer to 70%-80% for an aggressive job search. 

I’m going to make a big bet about the job market this year. The fastest-growing role created by the AI boom won’t be engineers. It will be AI operations managers.

Most companies already have access to AI tools. ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and dozens of automation platforms are now embedded across marketing, HR, finance, product, and customer service. The problem is not access anymore. The problem is coordination. Organizations are deploying AI faster than they can manage it. Marketing uses one tool, product teams experiment with another, HR runs its own automation, and customer support launches chatbots. None of these systems were designed together, and very few companies have someone responsible for making sure they actually work together.

That gap is about to create a new category of work: people who run the AI layer of the business. You can already see the early signals in the market. The global AI operations (AIOps) market is expected to grow about 21% annually through the end of the decade as companies deploy AI systems across their operations.  The growth reflects a simple reality: AI systems introduce complexity. Businesses need people who can integrate tools, manage workflows, and maintain automated systems once they are deployed.

The gig economy is seeing this shift even earlier. Freelance platforms are reporting explosive demand for AI-related services as companies look for help implementing these systems. Fiverr’s 2025 trends report found that searches for “AI agent” services surged more than 18,000 percent as businesses rushed to integrate AI into their operations.  Most of those projects are not about building AI models. They are about connecting tools, designing workflows, and maintaining automations. In other words, companies are already hiring freelancers to act as fractional AI operations managers.