Executive Summary 

HR teams have long planned around one assumption: summer is when hiring slows down. Market signals increasingly suggest the opposite.

Across labour market trends, evolving candidate behaviour, and campaign insights from VONQ’s global programmatic recruitment platform, a clear shift is emerging: employers are bringing hiring activity forward. Candidates are engaging earlier and more intentionally. The result is real momentum – ahead of the September surge, not because of it.

The conditions this creates are measurable: reduced competition for candidate attention, stronger candidate intent, and more favourable recruitment economics. For teams operating with tighter budgets and leaner resources, this is a window worth taking seriously.

Capturing it, though, requires more than maintaining recruitment activity. It requires the ability to respond continuously to changing candidate behaviour, shifting channel performance, and fluctuating competition levels. This is where programmatic recruitment advertising becomes particularly relevant. Through automation, real-time optimisation, and performance-based investment, organisations can adapt dynamically to market conditions and turn a quiet season into a strategic advantage.

In this edition of The VONQ View, we explore why summer is becoming a competitive lever in recruitment, and how programmatic advertising enables organisations to capture it.

What our platform data is telling us

As a provider of programmatic recruitment technology managing high-volume campaigns across global hiring markets, VONQ has a unique view into seasonal recruitment behaviour through aggregated campaign performance and platform insights across industries, channels, and candidate journeys.

Three clear developments are emerging in summer hiring behaviour:

• Summer hiring activity is increasing
• Candidate behaviour is becoming increasingly mobile-first
• Performance-based recruitment strategies are delivering stronger efficiency during off-peak hiring periods

These shifts are reshaping how organisations should approach Q3 recruitment planning.

Summer is no longer a holding pattern

VONQ’s performance data shows that employers are no longer treating summer as a pause. Key signals from our platform include:

• Earlier timelines: Vacancies launched 4-6 weeks earlier compared to historic September-led hiring cycles (observed since 2023)
• Increased volume: 8-12% increase in roles posted during June and July compared to previous year
• Shifted onboarding: Peak in final offer activity shifted to late August compared to pre-2023 hiring patterns

External labour market data underline this. According to Eurostat1, euro area unemployment declined from 6.3% in July to 6.2% in August, compared with 6.4% during the same period the previous year – equivalent to approximately 170,000 additional people moving into employment during the summer period.

What was once a seasonal hiring curve is increasingly flattening. Instead of concentrated hiring peaks, employers and candidates are maintaining more continuous engagement throughout the year.

The same trend is visible in the United States. According to JOLTS data, job openings declined from approximately 7.4 million in June 2025 to 7.2 million in July, while the hires rate remained stable at 3.3%. This suggests that employers are posting fewer speculative vacancies but continue to fill critical positions at a steady pace, pointing to a more efficient and targeted labour market rather than a seasonal slowdown.

Several forces are driving this – both market and technology driven:

The sectors that aren’t waiting

Summer hiring activity is not evenly distributed across industries. VONQ’s sector-level analysis shows that while some continue to follow traditional seasonal cycles, others maintain – or accelerate – recruitment activity during Q3 in response to operational demand, workforce planning cycles, and changing market conditions.

• Education & Healthcare:
  Education peaks in June/July for academic year planning. Healthcare remains at 100% capacity to manage holiday staffing gaps. Healthcare remains at full capacity to manage staffing demand throughout the summer. U.S. labour market data further supports this trend, with the sector adding up to 87,000 job openings in a single summer month, making it one of the strongest drivers of hiring activity during the period.
• Construction & Engineering:
  Project-driven demand and seasonal operating conditions contribute to an estimated 15% increase in hiring activity.
• Logistics & Retail:
  Recruitment begins in late July/August to prepare for the “Golden Quarter” (Black Friday/Christmas) ramp-up.

More broadly, hiring reports for the technology sector in 2025 show that specialised roles in AI, Data Science, and Cybersecurity did not follow seasonal lulls. Hiring for these niche roles remained competitive throughout the summer window.

Candidates have moved to mobile. Has your recruitment?

Studies consistently show that job-seeking activity increasingly migrates to mobile during the summer months  –  candidates checking  LinkedIn and job boards from the beach, the airport, or the park.

In 2026, an emerging behaviour is amplifying this further. “Micro-applying”,  using one-click mobile profiles – combined with save-for-later actions is bridging the gap between passive browsing and active conversion. Candidates who would previously have scrolled past a role are now bookmarking, shortlisting, and completing applications in fragmented moments throughout their day. The friction has dropped. The question is whether employer recruitment infrastructure is keeping pace.

Good market conditions don’t execute themselves

Candidate engagement remains high during the summer.  Mobile behaviour increases. Advertising competition softens. The conditions are genuinely favourable.

At the same time, recruitment teams often operate with reduced capacity, tighter budgets, and limited time for manual optimisation.

Traditional recruitment approaches are not always designed to respond effectively to this combination. .Fixed job postings distribute spend upfront, remain locked into predefined channels, and rely heavily on manual intervention at a time when candidate behaviour and market conditions continue to shift.

Programmatic advertising operates differently.

Rather than distributing recruitment budgets across fixed channels and static job postings, programmatic uses automation, performance data, and real-time decision-making to continuously optimise where, when, and how recruitment media investment is deployed.

By continuously analysing channel performance, candidate engagement, device behaviour, and conversion signals, programmatic technology dynamically reallocates investment toward the audiences and channels delivering the strongest results in real time.

This creates a measurable execution advantage during summer:

The numbers behind the seasonal advantage

Summer market conditions create a seasonal sweet spot where employers can improve both hiring outcomes and acquisition economics.

1. Peak Matching Efficiency

Matching efficiency measures how productively a job market connects vacancies with the right job seekers. In summer, this efficiency peaks due to three distinct factors:

• Reduced Noise: Casual applicants who flood portals during the January rush step back, significantly improving the “signal-to-noise” ratio for recruiters.
• Higher Intentionality: Candidates remaining in the talent pool are highly motivated. When the market appears to cool, the connections made are far more precise.
• Fewer Frictions: With lower total application volumes to wade through, HR teams and algorithmic screening tools identify the “perfect fit” faster.

Evidence from both European and U.S. labour markets suggests that while overall vacancy volumes have moderated, hiring activity has remained comparatively stable, indicating that employers are connecting available roles with active job seekers more efficiently than during the high-volume hiring cycles of previous years.

2. Lower acquisition costs

With VONQs Programmatic solution, employers respond dynamically to changing conditions – creating opportunities to maximize recruitment budgets, particularly between July and mid-August.

Summer is no longer downtime. It is decision time.

Summer recruitment is no longer defined by lower activity – but by different market conditions.

As this report shows, hiring behaviour is becoming more continuous, candidate engagement increasingly mobile-first, and recruitment economics more favourable during the summer period. Employers that adapt to these dynamics can benefit from lower competition, stronger candidate intent, and more efficient acquisition costs.

This creates a window of opportunity that extends beyond filling vacancies.

Lower CPC, improved CPA, and increased mobile engagement mean organisations can build talent pipelines more efficiently while competitors delay action until traditional hiring peaks return. Combined with automation, optimization, and performance-based execution, summer becomes less of a resource challenge and more of a strategic growth lever.

The implication is clear: waiting until September increasingly means entering the market when competition, advertising pressure, and acquisition costs are already rising.

The organisations that win in Q3 and beyond will not necessarily be those spending more – but those recognizing that summer is no longer a pause in recruitment.

The most valuable candidates will not wait for the market to restart. Increasingly, neither should employers.

The same report is also available as a PDF download.

Footnotes

1. Eurostat, Euro Indicators – October 2025.
2- Federal Reserve Board, What Drives Matching Efficiency? A Tale of Composition and Dispersion (2011).
3. VONQ proprietary data and internal analysis.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) News Releases, 2025. Available at: JOLTS News Releases

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In case you missed it, I was a special guest on Chad and Cheese this week. I was happy to join Chad, Emi, and J.T. to give an update on the Job.com story I wrote about two weeks ago.

And yes, there is more coming on that story. But this week I have other deep thoughts rattling around, so we are setting Job.com aside for a beat.

What’s on tap this week:

• JobGet acquires RippleMatch, and the consolidation scorecard ticks up to six
• Indeed plays coy with an ominous agency email and, I believe, the earnings call has already spoiled the ending

JobGet Acquires RippleMatch

JobGet keeps shopping. The company has added early-career and Gen Z hiring platform RippleMatch to its portfolio, and per the announcement, it is the sixth acquisition for founders Tony Liu, Billy Lan, and Peter Lee.

The prior five, for those keeping a scorecard: Heroes Jobs, Wirkn, Snagajob, Seasoned, and FoH/BoH. RippleMatch makes six.

JobGet is methodically buying up the fragmented hourly and early-career hiring market one (distressed?) platform at a time and folding them under one roof, which is either smart consolidation or a very expensive way to build a platform, depending on where you sit.

Of course, terms of the deal were not disclosed.

What we do know is that RippleMatch was not cheap to build. Founded in 2016 by Andrew Myers and Eric Ho, the company raised roughly $79 million across six rounds, per Crunchbase and other funding trackers, including a $45 million Series B led by Goldman Sachs in 2022.

Indeed Plays Coy With an Ominous Agency Email

Yesterday I received multiple copies of an email Indeed sent to its agency reps, and the reaction was somewhere between a panic attack and an exhausted meh.

Here is my read of what it said: something is changing in the marketplace, Indeed is going to tell all customers directly (yes, even the ones who only became customers because you, dear agency, brought them and their budgets over), the announcement is coming at some unspecified point in the near future, and one day before it goes out, agencies will get early access to an FAQ in the help section.

That’s it. That is the whole message. No detail, no date, just mystery vibes and a forthcoming FAQ.

So what is it? The guesses are flying. Some are catastrophic. Plenty of others, from people thoroughly worn out by the constant Indeed rage-bait cycle, are a collective shrug and a bet on a nothing burger.

I have no idea either, but if someone who knows would like to tell me…

Reading the Recruit Earnings tea leaves

I read the last earnings call transcript hoping to read the tea leaves and maybe find some psychic guidance.

Two things jumped out and I doubt the irony will be lost of any of you, my friends.

First, CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba gave a somewhat puzzling and mildly nonsensical analogy comparing applying for jobs to shopping for a tablet.

The setup: he spent an hour agonizing over which tablet to buy, then realized it would all be easy if every tablet were free. Job sites, he argued, are “no different from a free e-commerce site.” Because applying is free, people apply to everything.  

In his words, globally people apply like crazy, pressing the apply button over and over.

Good gods above and below, this is either the most EPIC TROLL of all time or irony is completely lost on this man.

Second, Indeed both does not care about your data and while also caring enormously about your data, depending on which side of the marketplace you are standing on.

On the jobseeker side: no matter how much data on the user side you collect, it actually does not mean very much. What matters is whether the employer likes you. On the employer side, conveniently, the data is priceless.

Recruit has spent two to three years aiming its AI investment squarely at developing AI tools for the employer side, because what is extremely important for improving matching is collecting hundreds of millions of data points about which companies hire which “kinds of people”.

Translation: you, jobseeker, are just noise, the employer’s hiring pattern is signal, and Indeed is building the whole machine to serve the side that pays.

Is this Indeed’s effort to start to publicly steer the conversation away from user data collection ala Eightfold?

Excuse me, potential litigators, please ignore what we have been pushing for the last half a decade – all those job seeker data points aren’t what we came for.

THE FULL CIRCLE

Okay, here is where this story stops being funny.

The month before the agency email landed, Indeed’s terms of service for AI applications were drawing a lot of rightly concerned chatter, and once you read the terms the concern jumps off the page.

Indeed’s Terms, last updated May 6, 2026, spell out how the company’s “Apply For Me” tool works on the billing side.

When a jobseeker turns on Apply For Me and Indeed’s AI fires off an application on their behalf, that auto-apply may be counted as an impression, may be counted as a click, and may count as a Started Application.

Under Indeed’s pricing models, each of those is a billable event, and the Terms repeat after every single one that Indeed’s count shall be binding. (Indeed Terms) 

Indeed gives the jobseeker an AI that can apply to jobs automatically. Then Indeed charges the employer when that AI-generated application arrives. The jobseeker, in some cases, did not knowingly apply, the employer did not ask for that specific application, and Indeed collects on both the volume it manufactured and the measurement it alone controls.

Indeed is using AI to drive applications on the jobseeker side and using AI matching to drive spend on the employer side, while sitting in the middle billing for the traffic between them.

And the risk lands on the humans at both ends: the jobseeker whose AI application gets auto-rejected by an employer’s AI screener, and the employer paying for an application nobody with a pulse chose to send.

The Terms, meanwhile, are emphatic that Indeed does not and will not serve as an agent or decision maker for any employer or jobseeker.

The Actual Tea Leaves

Now the part without the snark. Whatever the announcement turns out to be, the Recruit Holdings earnings call already told us the direction of travel.

US ARPJ, Indeed’s average revenue per posted job, grew 25% year over year in Q4 in the U.S., and full-year FY2026 ARPJ is guided up 18% even as the company assumes US job postings on Indeed fall about 4% year over year.

The growth engine is Premium Sponsored Jobs and AI matching that now drives 70% of applications through suggestions and pop-ups rather than keyword search.

Idekoba was explicit that he would like to push ARPJ growth to 30% or even 40% if customers will bear it, with the pitch to large enterprises being to reallocate budget away from staffing agencies and other resources toward Indeed.

So here is the real-real of what to expect from the coming announcement. Prices keep climbing. You spend more to feed the AI matching machine. You pay for real applies and AI-driven applies alike.

And the whole thing will be framed as cheaper than a staffing agency, because comparatively, it is, if it works. That is the entire strategy, stated plainly on the call and written into the Terms.

The mystery email is just the wrapping paper.

Got a tip on what Indeed is about to announce, or anything else worth a look? Send it my way. The tip line is always open and always confidential.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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Happy Friday, Job Board Doctor friends!

Something caught my eye in last month’s JobMarketPulse monthly data dive, so I asked the team over at Aspen to take a deep dive this month.

I hope it helps provide some insights and spark some ideas to identify some bright spots you can leverage in a less than thrilling labor market.

Let me know what you think.

Nobody Is Watching These Cities and that is the opportunity.

There is a version of the 2026 labor market story that goes like this: hiring is soft, vacancies are down, employers are cautious, and the best strategy is to wait for the cycle to turn.

That version is not wrong, exactly. It is incomplete in a way that creates a market opportunity for whoever pays closer attention. 

Because while the national numbers are doing their slow decline, something interesting is happening in a handful of cities that most job board operators don’t see. Hiring is not just holding up in these places. It is accelerating. Dramatically. For reasons that have nothing to do with the economic cycle and everything to do with where the United States has decided to park its next few decades of industrial ambition.

Four metros. Real numbers. Named employers. And a question at the end that the industry has not adequately answered… yet.

Let’s get into it.

First, Setting the Stage

The national picture heading into mid-2026 is one of consolidation rather than growth. Aspen Tech Labs’ Q1 2026 JobMarketPulse report shows U.S. job postings down 2.0% year over year, with 44 of 51 states posting declines and most major metros tracking the same direction. The pullback is broad but measured; employers are not panicking, they are just not expanding.

The BLS March 2026 data adds a useful caveat: payrolls rebounded to +178K after February’s -133K, but unemployment only held steady because the labor force shrank by 396K. Job creation did not keep the rate flat; a smaller workforce did. Worth keeping in mind when reading any headline that calls the market stable.

Now zoom in. Because within that national picture, four metro areas are posting year-over-year vacancy growth that looks nothing like the trend. The employers driving it are not responding to the economic cycle. They are responding to capital commitments, in defense, AI infrastructure, and logistics, that operate on an entirely different clock.

Those are the markets worth paying attention to right now.

Figure 1: Non-Traditional Hiring Hubs, last 12 months

San Jose, California: The Tech Market Did Not Recover. It Shed Its Skin.

Here is a headline that sounds reassuring: San Jose job postings are up 7% YoY as of April 2026.

Here is what is actually happening underneath it: the tech market in the Bay Area has quietly become a completely different industry.

The names growing fastest in the market are Nvidia (+167%, 1,203 active postings), Applied Materials (+278%, 503 postings), Waymo (+286%, 257 postings), Astera Labs (+326%, 95 postings), and General Motors (+409%, 127 postings). Adobe is up 111% with 422 postings. These are companies building the physical infrastructure that AI runs on, chips, semiconductor equipment, autonomous systems, and next-generation connectivity hardware.

Meanwhile, Meta job postings are down 76%. TikTok is down 35%. Keylent is down 48%.

The consumer internet era of Bay Area hiring is quietly deflating. The AI hardware era is inflating to replace it. And these are not the same jobs, the same candidates, or frankly, the same recruiting challenges. A platform built to connect product managers with Series B startups is operating in a shrinking corner of this market. A platform that understands this market and has been built for it is sitting directly in front of the growth. 

San Jose is where that wave is most concentrated. The roles that Nvidia, Applied Materials, and Astera Labs are advertising require a different kind of matching capability and a different kind of candidate pipeline. A platform that has not noticed the rotation has already missed a year of it.

Huntsville, Alabama: Every Single Contractor Is Hiring at Once.

Huntsville is up 11% YoY as of April 2026. Fine. But the number that should stop you in your tracks is not the metro total; it is the employer list:

• Amentum: +545% (143 postings)
• Yorktown Systems Group: +608% (75 postings)
• Lockheed Martin: +211% (141 postings)
• Raytheon Technologies: +189% (68 postings)
• Leidos: +105% (161 postings)
• Astrion: +110% (54 postings)
• L3Harris: +71% (70 postings)

In recruiting, when one big employer in a region is hiring aggressively, you chalk it up to a contract win. When every major employer in a region is hiring aggressively at the same time, something structural is happening. Federal investment is flowing through the entire Redstone Arsenal ecosystem simultaneously, into missile defense, space systems, hypersonics, and a dozen other programs that Huntsville has been home to for generations.

And it just got bigger. In April 2026, U.S. Space Command officially took operational control of its new facility at Redstone Arsenal, marking the start of a phased headquarters relocation that will bring an estimated 1,400 military and civilian positions to the region. The first operational unit stood up on April 15. The permanent headquarters complex breaks ground in 2027. The hiring pipeline that follows a move like that does not wait for the building to open.

According to Rocket City Now, Redstone Arsenal directly employs around 45,500 people on-site and supports a further 100,000 jobs across the wider Tennessee Valley through its contractor and supplier base. Total annual economic impact: $36.2 billion, accounting for 58% of the region’s entire gross regional product. That is not a military base with a jobs program attached to it. That is an economy with a military base at the centre of it. 

And it is almost entirely ignored by mainstream job platforms, because hiring here relies on security clearances, aerospace engineering credentials, and government contracting relationships. None of that fits neatly into a keyword search box. None of it generates the kind of high-volume, broad-audience traffic that keeps generalist boards’ metrics looking good. So the market sits there, enormous and underserved, waiting for someone to build for it properly.

Hermiston-Pendleton, Oregon: When One Employer Rewrites the Map.

And then there is this one. Hermiston-Pendleton, Oregon, has the strongest growth of any market in this analysis at +21.9% year over year, and the data behind it is almost uncomfortably simple.

Amazon went from 64 active postings to 427. That is a 575% increase. One employer, one infrastructure expansion decision, one small Oregon metro that was not on anyone’s list twelve months ago, and now has over 400 open roles in fulfillment operations, logistics management, and data center support.

Amazon does this. It is not random. The company deliberately targets secondary and tertiary markets where land is cheap, logistics corridors are accessible, and local governments are enthusiastic about the investment. Amazon has invested in over 1,000 small towns and rural areas across the U.S. since 2010, and the pattern is consistent: one infrastructure wave arrives in a market that nobody was watching, and within a year, the local hiring landscape looks completely different.

Huntington-Ashland, West Virginia

Hermiston-Pendleton is the clearest example of that pattern in the current data. But it is not the only one. Huntington-Ashland, West Virginia, a significantly larger metro, is up 12.5% year over year for a broader set of reasons, one of which follows the same logic. Vertiv, which manufactures power management and cooling systems for data centers, has grown from essentially zero presence in the market to among the top five employers in the metro.

The Data Center Map shows exactly how distributed this infrastructure build-out already is, in Northern Virginia, central Iowa, west Texas, and eastern Oregon. The supply chain hiring that follows it is landing in places that look nothing like traditional tech markets.

The interesting question for job boards is not whether this happens, it clearly does, but how quickly you can detect it and serve it. If your strategy for discovering new markets is waiting for an employer to call you, you are going to be 18 months late every single time. If you are tracking vacancy data at the employer and metro level in real time, both of these markets show up in the numbers long before they show up in the press.

So What Do These Four Cities Actually Have in Common?

Nothing obvious. A Bay Area tech hub, a Deep South defense city, an Appalachian manufacturing market, and a small Oregon logistics corridor do not share demographics, geography, industry history, or culture.

What they share is that each one is being reshaped by a capital commitment large enough and durable enough to override the normal softness in the broader labor market. AI hardware investment. Federal defense spending. Data center infrastructure buildout. E-commerce logistics expansion. These are not cyclical hiring surges that will evaporate when sentiment shifts. They are multi-year, multi-billion-dollar structural programs that will generate employer demand, whether the rest of the economy is cooperating or not.

And yet these markets remain largely untapped by the current generation of job platforms, not because the technology is not there, but because the business model of large generalist boards is built around volume in established markets. None of these cities generates enough aggregate traffic to make them an obvious priority for a platform whose growth strategy is centered on New York, London, and Sydney.

That is exactly what makes them interesting.

The opportunity compounds in ways that go beyond the initial hiring wave. When a market heats up in one sector, it does not stay contained there. Defense contractors hire engineers in Huntsville; those engineers need houses, schools, doctors, and restaurants. Amazon builds a data center campus in eastern Oregon, and suddenly the local healthcare system needs more nurses, the school district needs more teachers, and the town needs more of everything that follows a growing population. One structural investment triggers a much broader economic expansion, and that expansion generates hiring demand across every sector, not just the one that started it.

For job boards, that dynamic matters enormously. A platform that establishes itself in Huntsville or Hermiston-Pendleton at the beginning of a growth cycle does not just capture the defense or logistics postings. It captures the entire labor market as it expands. The network effects that make large platforms dominant in major cities work exactly the same way in secondary markets; they just have not been built there yet.

The CHIPS and Science Act has committed over $61 billion to semiconductor fabrication in Arizona alone, with Ohio and New York each receiving more than $20 billion, anchoring advanced manufacturing in states that were not on the tech industry’s map five years ago. Defense budgets are doubling down on markets like Huntsville. Hyperscale data center construction is spreading into markets that look nothing like traditional tech hubs.

Even in healthcare, Aspen’s JobsIndex data through February 2026 shows Dallas and Miami growing while New York and Boston plateau, the exact same secondary market growth pattern playing out in an entirely different sector.

The hiring map has been redrawn. The question is whether you are working from the new one or the old one.

Note: All employer-level vacancy data is sourced from Aspen Tech Labs’ JobMarketPulse, April 2026. Healthcare vacancy data from Aspen Tech Labs’ JobsIndex, February 2026. Additional labor market context from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As always, tell me what you think.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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Happy Friday, Job Board Doctor friends! Today we dive into a story I have been following closely. Let’s get to it!

When Job.com filed for Chapter 11 on July 6, 2025, our heads were all spinning as we watched a very different bankruptcy story unfolding. CareerBuilder and Monster had filed a few weeks earlier: the end of an era for the entire talent acquisition industry.

Job.com’s bankruptcy did not fit neatly into the narrative we in the industry wanted to tell ourselves. An AI-driven recruitment platform that had spent four years acquiring staffing agencies and developing a patent portfolio was certainly not the ghost of 1990s tech.

So Job.com got a same-day write-up in Law360, a brief from Staffing Industry Analysts, and a paragraph or two in AIM Group’s coverage. Chad and Cheese, of course, got in on the story. I wrote about it on July 10, alongside a separate story about Indeed and HelloWork. 

Then we all shrugged and moved on.

In the eleven months since, two federal courts have kept building a record about Job.com and its co-founders. I have been following closely. As we run up to the one-year anniversary of the Monster and CareerBuilder disaster, now is a good time to take the deeper dive this story deserves.

Understanding the Job.com structure

Job.com is a brand, not a single company. The legal structure underneath it is a stack.

At the top sits MJM Tech Ltd., a UK company co-founded by Paul Sloyan and Arran Stewart.

Below it is My Job Matcher, Inc., a US based Delaware corporation incorporated in 2015.

My Job Matcher owns several U.S. subsidiaries, including the staffing businesses Job.com acquired over the years. (First Day Filings, Exhibit 1).

Two men built and ran all of it. Stewart, the public face of the company, served as Chief Visionary Officer. Sloyan served as Chief Executive Officer. Together they were the board of directors of My Job Matcher (ECF 13, ¶ 21).

Only the U.S. companies, My Job Matcher and its subsidiaries, filed for Chapter 11. 

MJM Tech Ltd., the UK parent, stayed outside the filing. So did Stewart and Sloyan’s positions there. Even after they lost control of the U.S. operating company, both remained officers and directors of the UK parent (ECF 13, ¶ 21).

$42 Million in the hole

The Chapter 11 petitions for My Job Matcher and its affiliated companies were not signed by either Stewart or Sloyan.

They were signed by Robert J. Corliss, a restructuring executive who had been installed as CEO sixty days earlier, on May 7, 2025 (ECF 13, ¶ 1).

Stick with me here, that change in control was not the founders’ choice.

The company had borrowed against a 2022 credit agreement secured by three lenders with a fourth party, Ankura Trust Company, LLC, acting as administrative agent.

As part of that financing, the UK parent company, MJM Tech, had pledged its entire equity stake in Job.com to the lenders. 

By the petition date the company owed them more than $42 million (ECF 13, ¶¶ 25-26). 

loan Defaults

When the defaults that began in 2023 continued to be unsatisfied through January 31, 2024, the lenders, collectively, decided it was time to take action. 

On May 7, 2025, Ankura exercised the equity pledge to take control of the company.

The move allowed them to remove the entire existing board, install David Mack of Drivetrain, LLC as independent director, and make Corliss chief executive in place of Sloyan (ECF 13, ¶¶ 36, 39).

Until that day, Stewart and Sloyan had been the board. Now both were out.

The timing of this is important for the next part of our saga. Corliss’s advisory firm, Corliss Moore & Associates, had been working inside Job.com since February 2025, three months before the board change, alongside the prior leadership (ECF 13, ¶¶ 1, 38).

He was not an outsider guessing at what had gone wrong. He had watched it.

THE NEW CEO’s Take

The clearest account of how Job.com was run before the bankruptcy comes from the man who took it over. As a part of the bankruptcy filing, Corliss signed his declaration on July 6, 2025, under penalty of perjury.

In the filing, the new CEO describes in detail what his team found.

In his words, the company “suffered from disorganized and, at times chaotic, stewardship under their former management” (ECF 13, ¶ 35).

Three specific findings stand out.

• First, payroll. Corliss states that “payroll and payroll tax withholdings were not properly done” (ECF 13, ¶ 35). That is a serious allegation for more reasons than I can count, but may also hint at further legal exposure. Federal law allows the IRS to hold individual “responsible persons” within a company personally liable for employment taxes that were withheld but never paid over (26 U.S.C. § 6672).
• Second, collateral. Corliss states the company entered into “numerous transactions where it purported to sell or pledge the sale collateral multiple times” (ECF 13, ¶ 35). In plain terms, that describes pledging the same assets to more than one party. 
• Third, the records themselves were such a mess that one of the company’s first court filings was a motion to compel former officers to turn over records (ECF 13, ¶ 55).

Unpaid wages 

According to Corliss’ declaration, in February 2025, the company was “forced to shutter their per diem healthcare staffing business, QCI, when all of QCI’s employees quit due to the Company’s failure to timely pay wages” (ECF 13, ¶ 37).

A similar problem surfaced publicly five days later, involving a different part of the company. Former Fortus Healthcare employee Stacey Benware confronted Stewart on LinkedIn about uncorrected 2024 W-2s for people she described as Job.com “volunteers.”

Fortus, unlike QCI, was still an operating business at the time of the bankruptcy (ECF 13, ¶ 18). But read alongside the Corliss declaration, Benware’s complaint points to the same theme the new CEO described: unpaid wages and unresolved tax paperwork running through portions of Job.com’s operations.

The New Jersey judgments

While the bankruptcy moved through the Delaware court, a separate case in New Jersey federal court was working its way to judgment.

The plaintiffs are, David Campeas and Gary Suskin, the former president and chief operating officer of MJM.

They sued the company, Sloyan, Stewart, and a fourth co-defendant, Mark Guest, originally in Somerset County Superior Court in September 2024, seeking roughly $333,000 in unpaid wages, bonuses, expenses, and a loan (Campeas v. Stewart, D.N.J. No. 3:24-cv-10730).

Stewart removed the case to federal court in November 2024.

After that, neither Stewart or Sloyan responded to the lawsuit. 

The result was a series of default judgments entered in March 2026:

• Against Stewart: $377,730 to Campeas and $975,657 to Suskin (ECF 45).
• Against Sloyan: $418,072.50 to Campeas and $1,015,999.50 to Suskin (ECF 47).

That is roughly $2.78 million owed by the two co-founders to their own former president and COO.

Where things stand

The bankruptcy itself is over. The $35 million credit-bid sale to Jobs Acquisition Co. LLC, an affiliate of the same secured lenders, closed October 7, 2025 (ECF 302).

Because the secured debt exceeded $42 million, the company was sold for less than it owed its lenders. The liquidation plan was confirmed by cramdown, meaning the court approved the plan over the objection of unsecured creditors.

The unsecured creditors include other TA vendors whom, like in the Monster and Careerbuilder case, won’t get paid what they were due. 

A Liquidating Trust now holds the company’s remaining rights to file potential legal claims against former officers and directors under the Bankruptcy Code. None have been filed yet. The clock on most of them runs through July 2027.

A year after CareerBuilder and Monster dominated the conversation, Job.com has mostly faded from view. The federal record has not.

• Sworn findings of payroll-tax failures.
• Sworn findings of the same collateral pledged more than once.
• A healthcare workforce that quit over unpaid wages.
• Nearly $3 million in default judgments against the co-founders.

And yet, this story is not over yet.

In December 2025, an outside creditor sued the lenders, their law firm, and both co-founders in Delaware federal court, alleging in a third case, Takefman v. Corliss, that the ownership of Job.com’s core software was misrepresented to the bankruptcy court, claims that remain in adjudication.

We will also follow the borrowing that kept Job.com alive in its final months, including high-cost merchant cash advances and the obligations now reaching beyond the company to its founders.

As always, tell me what you think.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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My takeaway: There are a lot of niche job boards doing really important and good work. They are bringing energy, ideas and dedication to their communities to the table.

I was also totally (seriously) humbled with not one, but two DJAX awards in the evening gala, the Community Champion Award and the Outstanding Impact in a Niche Market for an Established Platform, which was awarded to Disability Solutions.

For me, the highlight was the DJAX Community Champion Award. I was nominated along with Steven Rothberg, Patrick Toet, and Martin Lenz.

I am not one to get sappy about an award, but this one coming from my peers in the industry means a lot more than I will express eloquently here. I am grateful.

Now let’s get to it.

Greenhouse Acquires Ezra AI Labs

On the candidate side, Greenhouse’s 2026 Candidate AI Interview Report says 63% of US job seekers have now been on the receiving end of an AI interview, up thirteen percentage points in six months. Of those candidates, 38% have already withdrawn from a hiring process because it included an AI interview, and another 12% say they will.

Seventy percent were never told upfront that AI would be evaluating them. Twenty-one percent only discovered AI was in the room once the interview started. Of the candidates who completed an AI interview, 51% never heard back at all. Not a rejection, not an advance, just silence.

Worth pausing on who is publishing this report. Greenhouse released the candidate experience data on May 1. Five days later, on May 6, they announced they had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ezra AI Labs, a voice-AI interviewing platform, with the explicit pitch that it would bring “conversational AI to the hiring process.”

CEO Daniel Chait’s own quote in the report was that “most AI in hiring today is making a bad system worse: more applications, less signal, and less transparency.” Greenhouse is now in the business of selling you their version of the thing they just told you isn’t working.

When the vendor publishing damning data on AI interviewing is the vendor about to sell you a new AI interviewing product, the industry should probably take a second look at we are doing.

ZIP gives away the disposition data game

On the employer side, the AI matching pitch keeps getting louder. The argument runs that once a job board plugs into your ATS and feeds disposition  and status data back into its matching engine, the platform learns which candidates actually advanced, refines its targeting, and starts delivering fewer, better applications.

Less noise. Better “fit”. 

In case you didn’t know it, and honestly I did not until last week, I have some news. ZipRecruiter has been collecting ATS disposition data through integrations like one with Greenhouse for years. The Greenhouse documentation is explicit: candidate stage and application status flow back into ZipRecruiter to feed its Smart Matching engine.

ZipRecruiter has had access to the exact data Indeed sales is telling you will turn it into the ONLY platform you need.

Well….ZipRecruiter’s Q1 2026 8-K, filed with the SEC on May 7, just told us what years of that data flow actually produced.

Revenue: Down 2% year over year. Net loss: $4.7 million. Quarterly Paid Employers: Flat year over year. Revenue per Paid Employer: Down 2% year over year.

If years of disposition data feeding a matching engine were the magic beans Indeed is selling, assumedly ZipRecruiter would have bent the curve on at least one of those lines.

They have not. Paid employer count is flat. The marketplace did not consolidate around them, and ZIP has not become the platform every TA leader is throwing budget in to.

Here is where ZIP gave the game away: In their quarterly earnings report, the product win they credited to the AI matching engine and “Be Seen First” feature in Q1 was a 37% increase in applications.

If matching were actually getting smarter in the way the end-to-end pitch demands, the brag metric would be the inverse.

In theory, because it is still theory, better matching should produce fewer, more qualified applications per requisition. That is the entire economic case for handing your disposition data to a job board.

The TA leader sitting in the Indeed pitch meeting is already drowning in application volume. The pitch claims disposition data fixes that, but it doesn’t.

While ZipRecruiter has been demonstrating in market that the disposition-data thesis does not pencil out, Indeed has been running a different play on the employer side. Employer spend per Indeed job is rising. The argument employers are getting for that rising spend is “we’ll be your end-to-end hiring solution if you connect your ATS.” The argument is being made by the company that drove their hiring costs down for years and is now driving them back up, with extra services bundled in.

Enter LinkedIn Apply Connect & RSC

Now, LinkedIn enters the ATS integration and disposition data room with Apply Connect and Recruiter System Connect (RSC).

Is there anyone in this industry who can come up with an original product name?!?!

LinkedIn’s tool is being sold as unified applicant management as you can see below.

For me at least, this is a developing story from LinkedIn so expect more in the coming weeks and tell me what you know so I can share with the our community.

Recruit Holdings Earnings Out Today

This morning, May 15th, Recruit Holdings released record-high financial results for FY2025, which ended on March 31, 2026.

For me, this quote says it.

Junichi Arai, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Recruit Holdings

“As Deko mentioned earlier, over the medium term, it is well within our reach to not only maintain double-digit annual revenue growth, but to achieve 20% or greater when hiring demand recovers. I also believe it is well within our reach, and at that time, we expect our EBITDA+S margin to exceed 50%. In the U.S. in FY 2025, amid stagnant hiring demand and while the total number of U.S. job postings on Indeed declined by approximately 7% year-over-year, monetization development resulted in revenue of $5.31 billion, an 8.8% year-over-year increase on a dollar basis with a U.S. ARPJ growth rate of 17%.” (earnings call transcript via investing.com)

Although, I am sure I will have more to say about it next week. 🙂

Let’s Put it All Together

Better signal makes matching better. Nobody is arguing otherwise. The question that should be live for every TA buyer is whether disposition is the right signal in the first place.

ZipRecruiter has now spent years feeding stage and status data into its matching engine and the result, by their own disclosure, is more applications per posting and flat employer growth.

That is the opposite of what better signal is supposed to produce. Disposition data may be telling these matching engines who got hired. It is clearly not telling them anything useful about who should have.

Hand your data over if you want. It will not fix your hiring.

Applications are up. ZipRecruiter just printed 37%. The candidate side has been weaponized by AI-assisted apply tools and AI-generated resumes optimized for ATS filters, and recruiter sunder 50 reqs is buried.

So when the marketplace sales reps call and offer to make your hiring smarter if you’ll just connect your ATS and route disposition data back to them, the question to put back is one sentence long: how did that work out for ZipRecruiter?

They have been running the experiment for years. The results are on file with the SEC.

Tell me what you think.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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Happy Tuesday, Job Board Doctor friends. 

This month, we are introducing a new addition to our thought leadership series. This is a critical conversation about black-box hiring and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Enjoy!

Guest Contributor: Ritu Mohanka, CEO of VONQ

What hiring leaders need to know in the age of AI-driven hiring

A couple of years ago, most hiring leaders were still asking whether they should use AI. Now the question is very different.

Almost everyone already is.

CV screening, chatbots, automated assessments, ranking tools – AI has quietly emVONQbedded itself into early-stage hiring workflows. The World Economic Forum estimates that close to 90% of employers now use some form of AI in hiring, often without giving too much thought to what’s actually happening under the hood.

And at the same time, something else has shifted. Regulators, candidates, and boards are no longer asking whether AI saves time. They’re asking harder questions:

– Can we explain this?
– Is it fair?
– Could we defend it if we had to?

That’s the real change. AI in hiring has moved beyond efficiency. It’s becoming a governance issue.

The questions I’m hearing again and again

Over the past 12 months, I’ve noticed a pattern in almost every conversation with large employers.

The discussion rarely starts with features anymore. It starts with risk.

– Are we even allowed to use this AI?
– What happens if a candidate challenges a decision?
– Can we explain the system in plain English to legal, procurement, or a regulator?

Some of this is being driven by regulation – New York City’s Local Law 144, the EU AI Act, and similar frameworks elsewhere. But a lot of it is buyer behaviour.

Legal teams, procurement, AI committees, and boards are now involved in AI decisions in a way they simply weren’t two years ago.

In other words, hiring technology is no longer being judged just on speed. It’s being judged on whether it’s defensible.

The real distinction that suddenly matters

As scrutiny grows, one distinction matters more than almost anything else:  Are you using AI that hides its logic, or AI that shows its working?

That’s the line between black-box screening and compliant AI.

What people usually mean by “black-box”

Most hiring leaders don’t use the term black-box, but they recognise it instantly.

These are systems that produce a score or a ranking without much visibility into how it was reached. Candidates are rejected with little explanation. Recruiters can’t easily see which factors mattered most. Over time, the output starts to feel like a decision, even if it’s technically labelled a “recommendation”.

The issue isn’t automation. It’s opacity.

When no one can clearly explain how a system works, it becomes impossible to defend. That’s where legal, ethical, and reputational risk starts to build, often quietly, until something goes wrong

What compliant AI looks like

Compliant AI works very differently.

Candidates are informed when AI is involved. They understand what’s being assessed. Recruiters can see how recommendations are generated and why. The system can be audited. And crucially, humans remain responsible for the final decision.

These systems also stay focused on what actually matters for the role: skills, experience, qualifications, not speculative signals like personality profiling or vague notions of “culture fit”.

One design principle matters more than most: screening people in, not out.

Instead of rejecting candidates early based on thin data, compliant systems gather more signal. They ask follow-up questions. They identify gaps. They give people a chance to show what they can actually do.

For candidates, the experience feels fairer and more transparent.

For employers, it’s far easier to stand behind.

A quick mental check

As organizations move toward 2026, there are a few questions HR teams should be able to answer without hesitation:

– Are candidates clearly informed when AI is used?
– Can the system’s logic be explained in plain language?
– Do recruiters have visibility into how recommendations are made?
– Is there evidence of fairness and bias testing?
– Do humans retain final decision-making authority?

If any of these questions cannot be confidently answered, it may indicate a gap between current practices and emerging expectations.

How we’ve been thinking about this at VONQ

This shift forced us to get very honest internally.

Not about what AI can do, but about what it shouldn’t do.

One line we kept coming back to was this: the moment AI starts making hiring decisions instead of supporting them, we’ve crossed a line. Not just ethically, but practically. Because if a system can’t be explained, it can’t be defended. And if it can’t be defended, it won’t survive long in an enterprise environment.

So we made a deliberate choice. AI should augment human judgement, not replace it.

Its role is to reduce noise, surface signal, and take on the work humans shouldn’t have to do, not to outsource accountability. That thinking shaped how we built EQO.

Instead of a single opaque model operating in the background, we designed specialised AI agents to support specific parts of the process: screening, interviewing, assessment, scoring, always inside existing ATS workflows and always with humans firmly in the loop.

The AI structures information, asks follow-up questions when data is missing, highlights patterns, and surfaces what matters. Recruiters still decide.

We also took a strong stance on something that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Bringing more signal in, rather than filtering people out faster

Most hiring technology is optimised for speed of rejection. Ours is optimised for quality of understanding. If something’s unclear, the system probes. If potential is there but under-evidenced, it asks.

The goal isn’t speed at all costs. It’s better decisions, with less guesswork.

That design choice wasn’t philosophical. It was practical.

The more explainable a system is, the easier it is to govern. And governance is now part of the buying decision, whether vendors like it or not.

That’s also why we chose to put EQO through independent bias and fairness audits early, even when it was uncomfortable and time-consuming. Not because it makes for good marketing, but because this is the level of scrutiny we see employers increasingly being held to.

If AI is going to sit anywhere near hiring decisions, “trust us” is no longer a sufficient answer.

Where this is all heading

Hiring will never be fully human again and that’s progress, not loss.

What dehumanises hiring isn’t AI. It’s volume, cognitive overload, and opaque systems no one can explain. When recruiters are forced to skim hundreds of CVs under pressure, bias creeps in; it doesn’t disappear.

Applied responsibly, AI can actually make hiring more human: more consistent, more transparent, more explainable.

That’s why the winners will be organizations that move faster by embracing responsible AI early in the hiring process. In this next phase of hiring, speed, clarity, and trust are no longer nice-to-haves; they’re genuine competitive advantages.

The systems that win over the next few years won’t be the most impressive demos. They’ll be the ones that fit into real organizations, scale responsibly, and can be defended with a straight face when someone asks:

“Can you explain how this works?”

We are busy into spring conference season and the news is not slowing down. So let’s dive right in.

• Job Boards Connect Unplugged – see you there?
• ICIMS New CEO
• JBD EXCLUSIVE: HireClix Career Site Buyout Program

Job Boards Connect – Unplugged

Who will be at Job Boards Connect in London next week? Like RecBuzz a few weeks ago, this is my first visit to this event and I am privileged enough to be on stage.

Unbelievably, I have been nominated for the Community Champion Award – along with some other industry smarties – Steven Rothberg, Patrick Toet, and Martin Lenz.  Of course, I am patting myself on the back to be counted among them.

If you are around, come say hi!

I am sorry I was unable to attend TA Tech in Charleston, South Carolina this week. If you did attend, hit me up and tell me what I missed.

ICIMS Announces New CEO…Their CFO

On May 4, ICIMS announced that their relatively new (2 1/2 years) CEO Jason Edelboim will step down and will replaced by current ICIMS CFO Marc Thompson (PR Newswire).

Thompson joined the New Jersey headquartered ICIMS as CFO in September 2024, from EverCommerce, where he led the company through its IPO and the execution of more than 50 acquisitions. Before EverCommerce he was co-head of investment banking at Oppenheimer & Co., running a software and services team that executed more than 120 financing and M&A transactions valued at over $15 billion (ROI-NJ).

Thompson is a finance bro’s definition of a PortCo CFO, now CEO, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see someone of Thompson’s caliber in the top spot. ICIMS has been owned by Vista Equity Partners since August 2018. TA Associates, another PE firm, has also invested in ICIMS in May 2022.

Why does Thompson’s appointment matter?

Outside of the revolving door of CEOs, it should give TA teams and other vendors a clear signal.

The TA team signing or renewing an ICIMS contract from this point forward is doing so with a finance-lifer CEO at the helm: whose track record is anchored in capitalization strategy, acquisitions, and IPOs, rather than in product roadmap or candidate experience.

PE value extraction is one of the structural conditions Neil Costa and the team at HireClix Career Site Buyout Program is built around. So let’s get in to it.

The Career Site Buyout Program, AEO, and What HireClix Is Up To.

Note | I have no skin in this game. I am neither dissing nor endorsing HireClix or ICIMS. My role here, my dear friends, is to provide you with the information and occasionally call balls and strikes, as I see them. If you love it or hate it, you know, I want to hear your thoughts. 

HireClix has had a busy ten days.

On April 30, the  Massachusetts recruitment marketing agency announced JobFlow AEO, a product designed to optimize employer career sites for citation by all the major LLM models including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity (BusinessWire).

It is a logical extension of last year’s JobFlow SEO release and the kind of product every recruitment marketing vendor should ship over the next 12-18 months.

The potentially more interesting move is one HireClix is about to announce, and it landed in my inbox first: a Career Site Buyout Program.

The pitch is clear enough. HireClix will cover a prospect’s remaining contract with a competing career site vendor, then migrate said employer onto a HireClix-built site without waiting for the renewal cycle. The company indicates this is available against all the major enterprise career site competitors, including ICIMS.

Both moves point at the same bet. AI is shifting how candidates discover and learn about employers faster than most career site vendors can keep up, and the multi-year contract structure that locks employers in is starting to look more like a liability than a comfort.

What is Jobflow AEO?

According to HireClix, JobFlow AEO does for answer engines what JobFlow SEO did for Google for Jobs: schema-enhanced job pages, natural-language content built around the questions candidates ask LLMs, structured data for ATS feeds, and analytics on AI referral traffic (HireClix press release).

Where SEO targets the ranked link list a search engine returns, AEO targets the answer itself, which often resolves the user’s question without sending them anywhere. The mechanics overlap (good SEO is still the foundation), but the metrics diverge. SEO is graded on rankings and click-through rate. AEO is graded on citation rate, brand mention frequency, and share of voice inside generated answers.

The structural cues differ too: an August 2025 Ahrefs analysis of 15,000 queries found that for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, roughly 80% of cited URLs do not rank anywhere in Google’s top 100 for the original query, while only about 8% rank in Google’s top 10 (Ahrefs).

Perplexity is the outlier, with about 29% of its citations also ranking in Google’s top 10, because it was built as a citation-first engine.

The takeaway: most answer engines weight signals like question-formatted headings, schema markup, original data, and citation density rather than traditional ranking factors, but the platforms vary (Ahrefs).

AEO success looks less like earning a click and more like being seen and trusted inside the answer.

AEO: keeping it in proportion

The use case is real.

Conductor’s 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report, drawn from 3.3 billion sessions across 13,770 domains, found AI referral traffic now represents about 1.08% of total web traffic and is growing roughly 1% month over month. ChatGPT alone drives 87.4% of that referral volume. Google’s AI Overviews appear in around 25% of searches (Conductor).

The use case is also contested.

SimilarWeb tracked a 15% decline in U.S. GenAI referral traffic between October 2025 and January 2026, after GPT-5.3 Instant became ChatGPT’s default model and started surfacing fewer citations per answer (DataReportal).

AEO is real.

Treating it the way operators treated SEO in 2014 misreads the trajectory: the answer engines decide how much they cite, and they keep changing their minds.

The takeaway for TA leaders

Do not lose AEO like you lost SEO (to Indeed). You must claim the schema, get the structured data right, build the AI-friendly content. Do not treat an AEO product as a strategic moat. The moat belongs to whoever owns the answer engine.

The Buyout Program Is the Real Story

Per HireClix, the program covers the prospect’s remaining career site contract with a competing vendor. In my conversation with HireClix Founder and CEO Neil Costa framed it as a bridge: 

The line I couldn’t let him out of our chat without knowing I could quote him on: 

“If your career site provider is owned by a soulless private equity firm, you won’t get the long-term partnership you need. Instead of a partner focused on giving you the tools and resources you need to be successful and attract top talent, you’ll be shackled to a company actively trying to squeeze you for every penny so they can maximize their profits.”

The “soulless PE” framing is both fire and grounded in reality.

ICIMS is owned by Vista Equity Partners. Radancy is owned by Gemspring Capital and New Mountain Capital (PitchBook). Symphony Talent is held by STG Partners.

Costa is identifying a real structural condition. One which HireClix is not subject to.

The financial mechanics is what is genuinely new. Buyouts are common in CRM and contact center procurement, but career site vendors have competed almost exclusively on RFPs and end-of-contract switching, not contract liberation.

A few things to note:

• HireClix has not published the program’s terms, cost ceiling, or eligibility criteria. It is described as available to all qualified prospects.
• HireClix’s own claim that the program “has eliminated or deferred their need to do a formal RFP” is, by the company’s own admission, anecdotal. It is too early to read this as procurement disruption.
• A vendor paying to make a contract problem disappear introduces an obvious incentive alignment issue: the buyer is now choosing partly because someone removed a barrier, not exclusively because the vendor won on product or service.

The System View

The more useful question is not whether HireClix pulls this off, although we will be watching closely.  It is what the buyout program reveals about the career site market’s structure.

If the bet works, it works because three conditions are already true:

1. Multi-year career site contracts are switching-cost cages. TA leaders know their candidate experience is underperforming but cannot exit the contract without write-offs that procurement and finance will not approve.
2. PE ownership cycles produce predictable squeeze patterns: price escalations on renewal, support reductions, R&D slowdowns. “Soulless” is shorthand for a product roadmap optimized for EBITDA rather than the customer.
3. Customer acquisition cost in this market is high enough that the math of buying out a contract works. This is the assumption HireClix will now be actively testing.

Bottom Line

JobFlow AEO is a sensible product release in a category that will be more commoditized inside 12-18 months. HireClix gets a head of the game with the launch and the buyout program.

The Career Site Buyout Program is perhaps the more interesting watch, because it is a structural bet, not a feature bet.

HireClix is wagering that the career site market is broken enough that employers will pay attention to a vendor offering them a way out, and that the returns justify the cost.

Whether they are right is the thing to watch in the second half of 2026.

Tell me what you think.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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No reason to delay – let’s dive in!

BLS Revisions

March payrolls came in at +178,000, well above the consensus forecast of 59,000. On paper, that looks like a strong jobs report.

But the BLS has now revised 10 of its last 11 monthly reports, nearly all downward.

December’s headline of +50,000 was restated to -17,000 just two months later. The jobs numbers you see today are rarely the numbers that sticks. Fortunately, real-time job posting data doesn’t get revised.

Here is what it shows for Q1 2026.

Figure 1: Monthly Change in U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation and FRED PAYEMS series.

The Overall Number Doesn’t Tell You Much

Aspen’s JobMarketPulse data shows U.S. job postings are down 2.0% year-over-year through Q1.

But the fuller picture is: 44 states down, wages up for full-time workers, and remote postings rebounding faster than the overall market. Not exactly the collapse many were bracing for.

Postings rebounded 9.4% from December to March, a seasonal pattern consistent with Q1 2025, and total active vacancies sat at 6.27 million by end of quarter.

The data makes one thing clear: there is no single jobs market right now. Where you sit; by role, by sector, by region, determines almost everything.

Figure 2: U.S. Vacancy Trend – last 12 months

Some Sectors Are Up. Others Aren’t.

Engineering postings grew 8.0% year-over-year. AI Specialist roles jumped 76.9%. Trades and Infrastructure – warehousing, construction, and skilled trades expanded 2.5%. Electricians saw advertised wages climb 8.7%, the largest gain among job titles tracked. At the same time, Marketing fell 6.4%. Nursing dropped 5.6%. Administrative Support is down 5.7%. Certified Nurse Assistants, a role that held up well through previous downturns, declined 9.2% year-over-year. Roles tied to physical infrastructure and technical work are holding or growing. Roles tied to organizational support and certain clinical functions are getting cut back. That pattern has real consequences for how companies should be thinking about hiring plans and compensation benchmarks right now.

Figure 3: Job Categories with the Largest YoY Gains and Declines

Geography: Mostly Down, With Some Bright Spots

44 out of 51 states posted year-over-year declines. Rhode Island (-11.9%), Oregon (-10.4%),and Maryland (-8.3%) saw the sharpest drops. The states that grew did so modestly; Wisconsin led at just +2.9%.

But zoom into the metro level, and a different picture emerges.

Dallas posted positive year-over- year growth among major markets. Dayton, Reno, and Huntsville, none of which are traditional hiring hubs, are among the fastest-growing metro areas in the country by job-posting volume.

Figure 4: U.S. Change in Job Vacancies by State – last 12 months

Wages Are Up Depending on Who You Are

Median full-time advertised salaries reached $64,147 in March, up 4.3% year-over-year and ahead of headline inflation at 3.3%. For full-time workers in the right roles, that’s a genuine gain. Electricians are up 8.7%. Software Developers and Project Managers each saw 4.7% increases. But hourly wages rose just 1.4%, well below inflation. Physician salaries declined 1.9%. Customer Service Representatives saw advertised pay drop 3.9%. There is also a notable milestone in the compensation data: more than half of U.S. job postings now include salary information, a threshold crossed for the first time in early 2025. Q1 2026 saw the first modest pullback in that trend. And the gap between states with pay transparency laws and those without remains significant: 78% versus 45%.

Figure 5: Advertised Wage Trends by Job Title

Remote Work Is Uneven, But Growing

Remote roles are 2.43% of all active vacancies in March, up from 2.12% a year ago. Remote postings grew 12.3% year-over-year and rebounded 22.6% quarter-over-quarter faster than the broader market. The composition shifted, too. IT now leads all categories by share of remote postings, followed by Marketing and Legal. Human Resources, which held the top spot last year, has dropped to ninth place. That tells you something about which functions employers are willing to keep flexible and which ones they are pulling back into the office.

Figure 6: U.S. Remote Vacancy Trend – last 12 months

There’s More in the Full Report

The Q1 2026 JobMarketPulse U.S. Jobs Report goes further, breaking down vacancy trends bydirect employers versus recruitment agencies, mapping the fastest-growing and declining metros across the top 100 markets, and detailing which benefits are showing up most in job postings and what that tells us about how employers are competing for candidates right now. If you make decisions that depend on knowing where hiring is actually headed, it’s worth the read.

Download the Q1 2026 U.S. Jobs Report

What do you think? Tell me. 

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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[Got a tip, document or intel you want to share with the Doc? Tell me. Tip so hot you need it to be encrypted? Use Signal.]

Data Methodology

The findings in this analysis are based on Aspen Tech Labs’ JobMarketPulse platform, which monitors hiring activity from more than 300,000 direct employer career sites worldwide. This dataset captures a substantial share of live postings and provides near-real-time insight into
employer demand. All figures reflect information published directly by employers, including salary ranges where available. All data comes from posted job requirements; salary figures should be interpreted as indicators of market trends rather than confirmed offer amounts. Changes reflect real shifts in hiring activity rather than database expansion or methodological

The sun is shining, as usual, in our lovely Portuguese village, padel is calling and there is a lot to catch up on this week.

Let’s dive in!

• Jobcase Restructure
• UKG Layoffs
• Entry-level Comeback?!?
• What Does it All Mean?

Jobcase Company-wide Restructure

Based on multiple LinkedIn posts from former Jobcase employees, last week the company executed a company-wide cost savings restructure.

We do not have details of the number of employees impacted by the Reduction in Force (RIF) action.  Based on a search of the Massachusetts WARN database, there is no record of a filing by the Cambridge headquartered company.

However, according to one LinkedIn post the RIF impacted, “a large part of the company.”

With Goff’s departure in early April and the interesting slide-ins of former Jobcase veterans Ben Kuntz and Donald Mannio into Advisor roles. Jobcase seems poised or potentially already in process of some sort of acquisition.

Keep your eyes on this space, for sure.

UKG Cuts headcount by 950

UKG cut roughly 950 jobs on April 15 (about 6% of its workforce), with about 600 exiting immediately and 350 staying through an August 31 transition. The company attributed the cuts to AI-driven market shifts and customer expectations under CEO Jennifer Morgan’s “AI-first” transformation.

This follows a late-2024 reduction of 2,200 employees (14 percent of the then 15,000 person workforce), bringing total post-merger reductions to more than 3,100 jobs Layoffhedge.

Other tech layoffs announced this week:

• Meta: up to 8,000 planned  while closing 6,000 unfilled roles. (NYT)
• Snap: 1,000 cuts following activist investor pressure (ABC San Fransisco)
• GoCardless: 90 UK fintech roles (CityAM)

Context for 2026 layoff pace: Layoff trackers diverge on their methodology but align on trajectory. Crunchbase/TrueUp puts 2026 at roughly 95,000 to 100,000 tech workers impacted through April 22, running ahead of 2025’s daily pace.

Oracle’s cut of 30,000 despite strong Q3 earnings remains the defining example of the “healthy financials, AI-driven cuts” pattern.

Although there may be more to this story, as Yahoo Finance is reporting the new CFO received $26 million in stock following the layoffs.

Entry-Level SIGNS OF LIFE?

Entry-level hiring signals flipped more positive this week.

NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, released this week from data collected February 12 through March 17, shows employers expect to boost Class of 2026 hiring by 5.6%, up from the 1.6% projection in NACE’s fall survey.

More than one-third of employers now report plans to bring in additional hires.

ZipRecruiter’s 2025 graduate report, released April 23, shows internship postings on its platform up 32% year-over-year, concentrated in white-collar fields.

McKinsey plans a 12% increase in North American hiring in 2026 with an explicit emphasis on entry-level.

IBM is tripling US entry-level hiring this year.

BLS numbers back the turn. Unemployment for workers ages 20 to 24 with a bachelor’s degree or higher fell to 6.2% in January 2026, down from 9.5% in September 2025.

An interesting twist caught my eye from the same NACE Spring Update: more than one-third of entry-level jobs now require AI skills in their job descriptions, nearly triple the share from fall 2025.

The jobs are coming back. What “entry-level” actually looks like is not the same job it was six months ago.

WHAT iS THIS WEEK TELLING US?

The signals this week don’t line up, and that’s the story. UKG cuts 950 in the name of AI transformation. Entry-level hiring forecasts tick up 5.6%. More than half of employers say they’re eyeing AI to absorb what new grads used to do. Oracle posts strong earnings and cuts 30,000 anyway.

Meanwhile, back in TA land:

59% of HR teams are already using AI in Talent Acquisition. Only 7% have a documented strategy for it.

That is 52% of your peers buying tools, flipping switches, and hoping the outputs don’t just hold up in court, but also don’t miss the vital talent their companies need to succeed.

AI’s impact on hiring and employment, overall, isn’t a straight line. It ebbs, it flows, it moves in opposite directions at the same time depending on the function, the quarter, and who’s doing the counting. Anyone selling you a tidy narrative is selling you something.

One or Two more things

A couple of more items worth mentioning before we go.

Jobiqo has announced a partnership with 8vance. The goal of the partnership appears to focus on bringing together skills-based recruitment and the marketing-based tools vital to keep job seekers activated and engaged. Read the full announcement here.

Last week, I joined Jessica Miller-Merrell of Workology to discuss one of my favorite subjects, the impact of changes at Indeed.

Tell me what you think. Am I being too hard on them? LOL.

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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Happy Friday, Job Board Doctor friends! I am wishing you well from the beautiful and very happy city of Budapest this week.

Why am I in Budapest? Well of course, enjoying my first (but not last) RecBuzz conference. Kudos to Peter Zollman and the entire AIM Group team!

FUNDING NEWS: HRFlow.ai Pre-Series A

Before I jump into my weekly deep thoughts, a quick share on some TA/HR Tech funding news.

HrFlow.ai announced this week, it has secured $7 million in it’s second round of Pre-Series A funding. The French data and AI infrastructure company founded in 2016 has now raised $10 million in capital. Read the full announcement.

The Hiring Process Is Broken for Real People

At every conference, in every webinar, on every roundtable, there is a version of the deepfake candidate story that is so easy to tell. Fraudsters are weaponizing AI. Fake identities are flooding the funnel.

In a full on, woe is me, employers are the victims, undertone.

Don’t get me wrong, the deepfake fraud problem is real. Recruiters are showing up to video calls and encountering candidates whose lips don’t quite sync, whose reactions arrive a half-beat late, whose polished resumes link to profiles that are just a little too perfect.

When their deepfake detection technology launched in early 2026, InCruiter found fraudulent activity in 25 to 30% of suspicious sessions, nearly double what even experienced human interviewers had previously identified.

Gartner projects that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fraudulent.

Here is what the conference tale that will sell so many products omits: before the bots arrived, the hiring process was already treating human candidates like an inconvenience, at best.

AI did not create this dynamic. It is scaling something that has been building for decades, and the people absorbing the real cost of this battle are the ones who just need a job.

The employer behavior problem

HR consultant Bryan Driscoll put it plainly to Newsweek companies, “expect professionalism, patience, and prompt replies from candidates, and then vanish without a trace the moment it’s inconvenient for them to respond.”

The data backs him up.

• 53% of job seekers experienced ghosting within the last year, a three-year peak.
• 48% were ignored by employers in 2025, up from 38% the year before.
• Eight in ten hiring managers admit they have ghosted job candidates.

This is not a technology failure. This is a choice.

The ghosting problem sits on top of a longer list of structural indignities. 30% of job seekers say unrealistic role requirements are their greatest challenge, with entry-level jobs routinely requiring three or more years of experience.

Ghost jobs, postings which exist to collect resumes, not fill roles are a documented, widespread practice that consumes real people’s time and hope.

Career Strategies Substack, focused on helping professionals rebuild confidence and execute employment strategies during long periods of unemployment, shares how job seekers are feeling.

“By late 2025, 73% of job seekers reported their searches were more difficult than before. Almost half expected to submit 26 or more applications just to get a single offer, with many bracing to apply to over 100 positions.”

With the reality of this environment and the injection of AI into every point of the hiring process by TA leaders eager to hire “better” and cheaper, it should be no surprise the candidates are also turning to AI to help them land their next role.

To me, it is a rational response to a process that has been communicating, loudly and consistently, that their time does not matter.

AI scaled the arms race. It didn’t start it.

Job seekers have long adapted to the dysfunction of hiring. They have mirrored job description language back in cover letters. They have memorized STAR-method frameworks. They have reformatted resumes for whatever parsing system was necessary for that ATS. None of that is new.

Employers automated screening to manage volume. Candidates automated applications to survive automated screening.

What is new is the speed and scale at which both sides are now operating. A Gartner survey found 39% of candidates use AI in some form during their applications, mostly to proofread, tighten up resumes, and prep for interviews.

Applicant volume is up but quality is not, AI is helping and complicating things at the same time, and recruiters are being asked to hire with far more precision than before. That precision comes at a cost the candidate is forced to absorb. Tighter filters catch more legitimate people. Longer processes burn more of a job seeker’s finite emotional resources. Automated rejections, or no rejections at all, leave people with nothing to learn and nowhere to improve.

And job seekers face their own fraud problem from the other direction. Job scams involving fake recruiters and ghost job postings jumped 37% in the first three quarters of 2025, with a 60% year-over-year increase in FTC-reported job scam claims. 45% of job seekers report that recognizing and avoiding job scams is one of the biggest challenges of their job search. The same person being treated as a fraud risk by a legitimate employer may, in the same week, have their personal information stolen by a fake one.

The verification trap

The obvious systemic answer to fraud on both sides is identity verification. Confirm who everyone is. Build trust into the infrastructure. It is a reasonable idea, right?

The problem is what happens to verified identity data once it is collected.

In late March 2026, Mercor, an AI-powered recruiting platform working with companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, confirmed a massive data breach. Hackers claimed to have walked away with 4 terabytes of data candidate profiles, identity verification documents including passports, and video interviews. The attackers did not target Mercor directly. They came through LiteLLM, a widely used AI middleware tool, via a supply chain compromise that affected thousands of companies simultaneously. Mercor’s infrastructure did exactly what it was supposed to do. That was the problem.

The candidates whose passports sat in that database did everything right. They complied. They trusted the platform. That trust became a liability. This is the part of the identity verification conversation the industry is not reckoning with seriously enough. Asking job seekers to hand over more sensitive data in exchange for safer access to the labor market only works if the infrastructure protecting that data is actually secure — and the Mercor breach is evidence that it is not.

Slings and Arrows From Every Side: Mercor, Adzuna, Talent.com, Aimwel and Jobcase.

Where AI actually helps. and where it does not.

None of this means technology has no role. LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter are all investing in platform-level verification and fraud detection tools. When done well, verification protects both sides. The most resilient recruiting workflows combine automation with human judgment  a layered approach that reduces false positives while ensuring fraudulent candidates don’t progress unnoticed, and improves the experience for real candidates who move faster through a cleaner funnel.

But technology cannot fix what is fundamentally a values problem. Decisions in technology purchases, data management techniques, assessments and policies that communicate to a real person that their application, their preparation, and their time were not worth thirty seconds of acknowledgment. No AI tool is going to solve that. TA leaders have to decide that the person on the other side of the process is a human being who deserves basic respect.

The question for RECRUITMENT TECH

Platforms sit directly in the middle of this. Fraudulent job postings erode job seeker trust. Fraudulent candidates erode employer trust. But so does a process that has spent years signaling to candidates that they are interchangeable and disposable. The job boards investing in integrity, on both sides of the transaction, are building something more durable.

Job seekers want respect, honesty, and basic professionalism. These are not unreasonable demands. They are the floor. We are a long way from it.

What do you think? Tell me. 

Until Next Time,

Julie “The Doc” Sowash

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