March 18th '26 / 11:50 AM to 12:05 PM PDT

Why Recruiting Feels Harder Than Ever (and what 1.2M Hires reveal about it)

Product Spotlight

The hiring landscape has changed faster in the past two years than in the decade before it—and we now have the data to prove it.

After analyzing 165 million applications and 1.2 million hires, we uncovered the trends shaping today’s recruiting teams, what’s slowing pipelines down, and where the most successful orgs are pulling ahead.

Speaker

Kirsten Byron

Head of Product Partnerships

Gem

What 1.2M hires reveal about the new enterprise baseline: Gem’s 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks: Recruiting demand is back, but team capacity hasn’t kept pace.

In this session, Kirsten (Head of Partnerships at Gem) unpacks what Gem’s 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks reveal about the new enterprise baseline—and the practical playbook TA leaders can use to hit it. The twist: it’s not just “use more AI.” It’s making your ATS/CRM + recruiting tools + AI workflows work together so adoption sticks, data stays clean, and recruiters get time back without breaking candidate experience.

3 takeaways you’ll leave with:

The 3 benchmark signals that define recruiting health in 2026 (and what they mean operationally)
Where AI drives capacity fastest when it’s embedded in workflows (and where it usually fails)
A simple “ecosystem checklist” to reduce tool sprawl + integration friction (what to standardize first)

Talent Acquisition

See the 2026 Agenda

Speaker

Kirsten Byron

Head of Product Partnerships

Gem