Something’s Wrong With Hiring, and It’s Not AI: 2 Reasons Buried in the Data

Many employers claim they’ve cut back on hiring because AI can do the job entry-level work employees once did.

But a new report from BambooHR tells a different story.

BambooHR looked at five years of data from more than 72 million job applications and 6.5 million completed hires — and the results ran counter to the narrative that AI is to blame for the slowdown. And they aren’t convinced we’re on an uptick. Yet.

Different Perspective on Hiring Stats

Some of the most telling Bamboo stats include:

• Applicants per job posting have nearly doubled: In 2021, it was about 45, and is 95 in 2025. But completed hires have fallen every year since 2022, dropping more than 20% — from 1.34M to 1.05M.
• The hiring rate fell. It dropped from 4.5% to 2.8% over the same period, even as job postings held steady.
• Companies promoted from within during the Great Stability. Internal mobility now accounts for 62% of all role fills, up from 51% in 2021, as companies grow more cautious about external hires.
• On the surface, AI looks big, but … AI-related job titles grew by 218% since 2021, but 83% of those roles were in tech, and even within tech, they represent just 1.5% of all titles. AI is reshaping demand, but not broadly and not evenly.
• Remote is falling out of style. Remote mentions in job postings fell more than 60% since their 2022 peak — from 4.2% to 1.6%.

“Many employers still assume hiring is hard because the market is tight or candidates are unwilling to move,” said Brandon Welch, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at BambooHR. “But in many cases, the real issue is that organizations are asking the funnel to do too much. When organizational uncertainty exists, decision-making is slow, or screening signals become noisy, candidate volume then stops being an advantage and starts becoming friction.”

Why Employers Struggle to Hire Right

If you’ve struggled to hire right — or want to ensure you get it right if you’re about rev up hiring again after the hiatus that’s been going on — you’ll want to know what BambooHR researchers found: two dynamics that quietly compounded hiring problems in many organizations.

• Workload creep: This is the gradual, often unnoticed expansion of employee responsibilities beyond their original job description, without a corresponding increase in pay, title, or resources. When workload creep goes unaddressed, it distorts hiring. Organizations post roles to solve problems that are actually symptoms of overburdened teams, not genuine headcount gaps.
• Critical role drift: This happens when the fundamental requirements of a position essential to the company’s competitive advantage shift over time without formal updates to the job design. The result is a mismatch between what the role was built to do and what the work actually demands.

“Both dynamics inflate hiring activity without producing desired hiring outcomes,” the researchers said.

The hiring reboot starts with role reviews.