Filled Roles Drew a Median 69 Applicants in July 2026, Up From 58, Workday Data Shows

The median number of applicants for each job that gets filled climbed to 69, up from 58 a year earlier, and 84% of job seekers in a Workday survey said they used AI during their search, according to the October 2026 Global Workforce Report from Workday, the HR, finance and IT software company. Hiring did not get faster, since the time it takes to fill a role held steady at about 60 days. For Metaintro readers, the useful question is what wins a role when the pile is that deep, so this piece sets Workday's numbers beside independent data from PwC's AI jobs barometer, ManpowerGroup's employer survey and Greenhouse's candidate survey on AI skills, hiring speed and how candidates are screened, and turns it into practical steps.

What Did Workday's October Report Find About Job Applicants?

The findings came out on Oct. 5, 2026, and the applicant figure compares July 2025 with July 2026, with applications for each offer rising from a median of 58 in July 2025 to 69 in July 2026. That rise happened even as overall hiring demand remained relatively flat.

Workday calls the jump a possible consequence of AI making it easier for people to apply to more jobs at once. The figure on AI use, 84% of job seekers, comes from its AI@Work Pulse survey, a separate Workday survey of 5,944 workers. Outside Workday's data, nearly half (49%) of U.S. job seekers were submitting more applications than a year ago in Greenhouse's November 2025 survey.

In Workday's data, the external market remains especially difficult to break into, with roughly one in 100 applicants ultimately getting hired.

More applications did not mean faster hiring, since more applications don't necessarily mean more qualified candidates. Roles mostly stay open because candidates lack the right skills or because pay, location, or flexibility don't line up with what people want, in employers' answers.

Which Industries Saw the Biggest Jump in Applicants?

Competition is especially fierce in two industries. The number of applicants for each filled job rose 27% year over year in financial services and 40% in technology and media, and in those two sectors 53% and 57% of applicants respectively answered that AI increased how many roles they applied to.

The congestion is not everywhere. Applications for each offer rose sharply in tech and media (+40.4% YoY), nonprofit (+37.4%) and financial services (27.2%), but fell in retail (-1.1% YoY), the public sector (-4.5% YoY), and education (-6% YoY).

Those three rising fields are also industries where job seekers lean on AI the most, in the analysis by Aaron Terrazas, a contributing economist for Workday.

Why Are More Applications Not Turning Into Faster Hiring?

The median days to fill open roles has been flat overall at 60 days, yet a majority of employers are taking longer to hire compared to a year ago in 10 of 12 industries. Larger companies that hire the most people are getting a little bit faster, while the long-tail of smaller companies that do less hiring are taking quite a bit longer.

Independent survey data shows no clear speed-up either. Twenty-eight percent of the 39,878 employers in 42 countries in ManpowerGroup's Employment Outlook Survey say their average time-to-hire has become faster compared with 2025, while 41% say it has remained about the same and 30% say it has become slower, in results released Sept. 8.

Forty-three percent of employers globally plan to increase staffing between October and December, compared with 14% anticipating reductions, and the global Net Employment Outlook for Q4 2026 stands at 29%. By some accounts from both job candidates and hiring companies, the labor market is congested rather than imbalanced, Workday contributing economist Aaron Terrazas writes.

Employees may not be changing jobs, but their jobs are changing around them, Phil Willburn, a Workday vice president, said, according to the Workday report announcement.

Which AI Skills Are Employers Asking For Now?

The skills data comes from job requisitions across over 550 employers using Workday Recruiting. Demand for basic AI skills like simple prompting rose through late 2025, peaked in January 2026, and then fell 25% over the following months.

Demand for hands-on skills like building AI tools, automating workflows, and AI engineering rose steadily, climbing 51% between September 2025 and July 2026. Over the same period, mentions of management and leadership skills fell 7% and training skills fell 13% in those requisitions.

For a wider view, PwC's barometer draws on job ads from six continents. PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer analysed more than one billion jobs advertisements in 27 countries and territories, and found that jobs requiring specific AI skills are growing almost eight times (69%) faster than the total jobs market (9%). The average wage premium for workers with AI skills hit 62%, up from 57% last year, in PwC's June 2026 release, and it was as high as 118% in some sectors, such as consumer markets, and 16% in government and public sector work.

The barometer came out on June 15, 2026, and the AI skills it counts include prompt engineering or machine learning. On the employer side, companies have moved on from wanting people who can just use AI to wanting people who can build with it, in the words of Workday's report.

Are Employers Using AI to Cut Jobs or to Change Them?

In Workday's report, most business leaders do not expect artificial intelligence to shrink their workforce. Some 40% of business leaders expect AI to help them get more out of the employees they already have, while just 28% expect it to reduce headcount. Those leader figures come from a global survey of 6,001 employees and business leaders, including about 1,780 decision-makers. These are expectations, not measured job losses.

Among employers planning to add staff, 62% cite changing roles and skills as the primary driver, ManpowerGroup found, and expected decreases are driven more by a soft economic environment as opposed to AI or automation.

Entry-level hiring is holding in that survey, with 45% adding early-career talent compared with 2025 against 20% pulling back. The skills bar is moving, though. In PwC's analysis of 2.4 million US entry-level jobs, the roles most exposed to AI are seven times more likely to require traditionally senior-level human-intensive skills like leadership, creativity or face-to-face interactions, and openings for those roles have grown 35% since 2019, while other entry-level roles shrank 10%.

AI is removing some of the routine work that once acted as an apprenticeship, while increasing demand for judgement, leadership and adaptability much earlier in careers, Pete Brown, Global Workforce Leader at PwC, said, according to the PwC barometer release.

Why Is It Harder to Move Up Inside Your Current Company?

Internal moves fell at 57% of employers year over year, and promotion rates worldwide stayed essentially flat, and nearly 4 in 10 employees answered that their company went through a reorganization or restructuring in the past year.

Employees trying to move internally most often pointed to hiring being paused for the role, managers who didn't support the move, and selection processes that didn't feel fair. About half of employees didn't even try to move internally last year, and of those, 27% answered that they simply didn't see an attractive opportunity inside their company.

Voluntary turnover sits at roughly 16% a year, and about 70% of employees are still with the same company two years later. Just 63% of employees feel favorably about their ability to advance within their organization, and nearly one-third say they're likely to look for an external role in the next 12 months.

79% of workers answered that they know what skills they need to succeed, but only 66% answered that their employer actually helps them develop those skills, even though 65% said they're confident they can learn new skills if asked to.

At work, in Workday's August 2026 AI@Work survey of 5,944 employees, 57% say they can't rely on AI outputs without checking them closely, and 37% say their manager hasn't talked with them at all in the past three months about how AI is changing their role.

How Do Job Seekers Feel About AI in Hiring?

Nearly two-thirds (63%) of U.S. job seekers in Greenhouse's May 1, 2026 survey have now been interviewed by an AI, up 13 percentage points from six months ago. The survey covered 2,950 candidates, including 1,200 U.S.-based workers, and the release's findings reflect the U.S. respondents (n=1,200) unless marked otherwise.

Many U.S. candidates were not warned, as 70% got no clear upfront notice that AI would be evaluating them, and among U.S. respondents who completed an AI interview, 28% moved forward to the next round, while 13% were formally rejected, and 51% never heard back.

Some candidates try to game the filters, and in a Greenhouse survey of over 4,100 job seekers, recruiters, and hiring managers published in November 2025, 41% of U.S. job seekers admitted to using prompt injections, while 65% of U.S. hiring managers have caught applicants using AI deceptively, including hiding prompt injections in resumes. Only 21% of U.S. recruiters are very confident that their systems aren't rejecting qualified candidates.

What Should Readers Know About Workday Before Using This Data?

Workday has a stake in this subject. More than 11,500 organizations worldwide trust Workday to deliver, in the company's own words, and the internal mobility, promotion and turnover figures come from de-identified workforce data inside companies that use Workday's HR software, limited to active customers with at least 250 employees. Its data does not cover businesses with fewer than 250 employees.

The company is also cutting its own staff. On Sept. 29, Workday disclosed a reduction of approximately 2.5% of its current workforce, primarily within its Product and Technology team, with estimated charges of approximately $65 million to $80 million. Based on a headcount of 20,896 people worldwide as of July 31, 2026, the reduction could affect around 500 employees, according to Business Insider reporting cited by People Matters. It is Workday's second round of layoffs this year, after reports indicated that Workday eliminated roughly 400 positions in February, when its CEO also stepped down.

Workday plans to continue to hire in key strategic areas and locations throughout its fiscal 2027, and it has not linked either its February or September workforce reductions directly to artificial intelligence. An earlier Workday workforce study also looked at AI and a tightening job market.

What This Means for Job Seekers, and How Do You Stand Out When 69 People Apply?

Our take is that some of the extra volume is what Workday's economist calls one source of noise, and noise rewards precision. If roughly one in 100 applicants ultimately gets hired and employers still say roles stay open because candidates lack the right skills or because pay, location, or flexibility don't line up, sending more applications is not the fix. Sending fewer, better matched ones is.

• Show what you built with AI, not that you can prompt. Basic prompting demand fell 25% after January 2026, while building tools and automating workflows climbed 51%. Put one concrete example on your resume, such as a workflow you automated and the time it saved.
• Lead with human skills too. In PwC's US data, AI-exposed entry-level roles are seven times more likely to require traditionally senior-level skills like leadership, creativity or face-to-face interactions, so name a time you led, persuaded or solved a problem with people.
• Answer the can-you-learn question. Workday's Phil Willburn says the question isn't just whether someone has done the exact job before but whether they can learn fast enough to solve the next problem, so show a skill you picked up recently and how fast you used it.
• Check pay, location and flexibility before you apply. Those mismatches are a main reason roles stay open, so applying where they fit focuses your effort.
• Never use hidden text tricks. In Greenhouse's November 2025 survey, 22% of U.S. hiring managers had caught applicants hiding prompt injections in resumes, so it is a risk, not a shortcut.
• Prepare for an AI interview and follow up. With 51% of U.S. AI interviewees in Greenhouse's survey never hearing back, a short follow-up note to a named recruiter is worth sending. In the same survey, 46% of U.S. candidates wanted the option to request a human interview instead, so it is fair to ask.
• Look where applications fell. Applications for each offer fell year over year in retail (-1.1% YoY), the public sector (-4.5% YoY), and education (-6% YoY), and in Workday's data companies with 250-499 employees were most likely to have growing payrolls.

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People Also Asked

Q: How many people apply for each job in 2026?

A: In Workday's data, the median number of applicants for each job that gets filled climbed to 69, up from 58 a year earlier, and it rose sharply in tech and media (+40.4% YoY), nonprofit (+37.4%) and financial services (27.2%).

Q: Which AI skills are employers asking for more often?

A: In requisitions at about 550 employers using Workday Recruiting, demand for building AI tools, automating workflows, and AI engineering climbed 51% between September 2025 and July 2026, while basic prompting fell, and the average wage premium for workers with AI skills hit 62% in PwC's 2026 barometer.

Q: Is AI making hiring faster?

A: AI has yet to make hiring consistently faster, in ManpowerGroup's survey. In Workday's data, time to fill a role held steady at about 60 days, and only 28% of employers in ManpowerGroup's survey say their average time-to-hire has become faster compared with 2025.

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