How Tech Hiring Actually Works in 2026 (From an active SaaS Recruiter)
The tech job market feels different, but hiring decisions are the same. Messy, subjective, and human.
If you're not familiar with my background, I left my 12 year tech industry recruiting career in 2022 to run my job search strategy business full-time.
After spending 2.5 years helping job seekers land interviews, tell better stories, and get unstuck in one of the toughest markets tech has ever seen…
…I went back.
Back into an in-house recruiting role at a small tech company. Back into hiring plans, pipeline reviews, headcount conversations, interview debriefs, and the delightful roller coaster that is SaaS tech.
I also talked to peers and friends doing in-house recruiting at other companies. They were seeing the same types of chaos: unexpected freezes, shifting requirements, inconsistent feedback loops. So this is not just my experience — it is how many companies currently operate behind the scenes.
So what have I found in the past 12 months?
The market feels different. The industry feels different. But companies themselves are exactly the same.
Some of them are even more “themselves” now than they ever were.
Here is what I learned:
1. Companies are still deeply insecure. (It’s just more obvious now.)
You would think that after a decade in tech, companies would have figured out who they are and how they want to operate.
Nope.
If anything, the 2022–2025 market reset has made leadership insecurity louder.
The data backs this up.
McKinsey reported in 2023 that 70% of tech leaders felt “significant uncertainty” about product direction, runway, or hiring quality.
A 2024 Lever survey found that 64% of hiring managers “don’t trust their ability to assess talent consistently.”
And according to Greenhouse (2023), one out of every two tech companies revised their hiring plan mid-cycle because leadership panicked about either spending too much…or not hiring fast enough.
If you’ve ever felt that job searching is like navigating a maze in the dark, here’s the truth:
the people on the company side are blindly wandering through the same maze.
In one of the first roles I took on, we reworked an iOS engineering role 4 times. The scope changed. The level changed. The priorities changed. Every shift came from a fear of choosing “wrong”—which was mostly informed by the fear of repeating past hiring mistakes.
The search only accelerated when the team stopped over-correcting and started trusting themselves. Once the hiring manager was empowered to make the final call, the right candidate moved through quickly, and the 5 month stalemate ended almost overnight.
From the outside, a job seeker might see that as incompetence. But honestly? It’s just insecurity.
It’s human. And it happens constantly in hiring.
It doesn't necessarily make job seekers feel better when they're on the other side of it, but I hope it helps ground folks in understanding that it’s not malicious.
2. Companies still value ‘top talent’. (They just don’t always know what that actually means.)
Every company insists they want “the best.” But ask them to define it and you’ll get at least 4 different answers from your hiring team.
In 2025, “top talent” has become even fuzzier in this overcrowded market. For every role I opened this year, we received 2–3x more applicants compared to 2021. (Normal across the industry: Indeed reported a 92% jump in applicants per tech role between 2022 and 2024.)
But more applicants didn’t create better clarity for our hiring teams. Instead, hiring teams experience immense pressure in picking the "right" candidate. Every time they see someone who might fit the bill, the fomo kicks in. Is this the right person? Is there someone better out there?
A real-world example from a recruiter friend: She was supporting a Product Director search. The role looked clear on paper. The hiring team seemed aligned. They kicked off the search confidently.
Then they ran 3 candidates through nine rounds (nine rounds!) of interviews. Then in round 9 the CEO decided these candidates wouldn’t do because they didn’t have deep MarTech experience.
So every candidate who made it far into the process — and then got rejected — walked away with confusing feedback about being “not the right fit.” But the truth was simpler. The team had not known what “right” was until they tripped over it.
This is why so many job seekers feel like they are shooting in the dark. Sometimes the decision criteria are being made up in real time.
The good news is that you can still win when teams aren’t yet clear. We do it every day inside Inevitable Offers.
3. Companies are still run by humans — well-meaning but fallible humans.
I don’t care how experienced the leadership team is. I don’t care whether the company raised $10M or $100M. I don’t care whether they brag about how much or how little AI they use in their hiring process.
Every resume pass, every “hire” or “no hire,” every calibration conversation, and every “what did you think?” Slack thread comes down to human interpretation. And human interpretation is messy.
Inside my own role, I see this constantly.
Interviewers evaluated project assignments based on how they would have approached the work. Instead of asking “Did this solution solve the problem?”, the feedback became “When I did this two years ago, I used a completely different approach…”, as if innovation only counts when it matches their personal template.
Design searches were even more subjective. I have never run a design search where someone did not confidently declare a candidate’s work “not high quality,” despite being unable to articulate what “quality” actually meant. The judgment was aesthetic taste disguised as rigor.
I watched hiring managers make leaps based on things candidates never said. A thoughtful pause became “They seem unsure.” A concise response became “Maybe they lack depth.” None of this came from the candidate. It came from the fears and assumptions in the room.
And truthfully? It's always been this way.
People bring their experiences, anxieties, preferences, and blind spots into the hiring process. They do not realize they are doing it. And they do not realize how inconsistent it can make the process feel.
When you understand this, you stop imagining that hiring is a precise, AI-optimized science. It is not. It is a group of humans trying to make a high-stakes decision with incomplete information, personal filters, and only a few hours of conversation.
The good news is that you do not need to be perfect. You simply need to be clearer, more relatable, and more grounded than the noise inside the process.
So what does this mean for you, the job seeker?
You’re navigating a market with:
more applicants
more noise
more overwhelmed teams
more insecurity
more blurry definitions of “fit”
But the actual structure of how hiring works hasn’t changed.
And when you understand how hiring really works, you regain something most candidates lose early in the search: power.
(If you’ve ever read any of my emails or listened to my podcast guest spots, you know this theme well — you have the most power in your job search when you run it strategically.)
Here’s what I want you to walk away with:
→ Companies are inconsistent. Your strategy cannot be.
This is why a repeatable system matters. When your approach is solid, company inconsistency becomes noise you can navigate — not a barrier that stops you.
→ Clarity wins interviews. Companies aren’t clear, so YOU have to be.
Your positioning, your stories, your resume — all of it should simplify the decision for them.
→ Humans make decisions. So build trust with humans.
The best candidates don’t need to trick the system or game the ATS. They build advocates.
This is the heart of what I teach. This is the entire reason I created Inevitable Offers.
Because when you know how companies actually operate — their fears, their blind spots, their predictable patterns — you can position yourself as the obvious solution.
And when you do that consistently?
Your offer becomes inevitable.
Because you’re not just “hoping” you get chosen. You’re guiding the process.
If this resonated, your next step is to make your own offer Inevitable.
If you want to turn your search into something predictable — where your message is clear, your interviews feel grounded, and your offers come faster — you’ll find everything you need inside Inevitable Offers.
It’s the exact system I used myself when I went back inside and interviewed after years away (I got an offer in under 6 weeks) and the same one my Senior–Director level clients use every day to land roles in this wild tech market.