Emma Mirrington - CEO of Talent Labs - joined us to present some fascinating facts and figures from their latest annual report! Below is a recording of the session and a quick summarised write-up (to enjoy with your morning coffee!)
A sense of accelerating change - political, economic, technological and human - was the thread running through an hour-long session packed with data, insight and hard-won practitioner wisdom. Here's what stood out.
Emma opened with something that talent teams don't always hear at industry events: the view from the C-suite. Drawing on Gartner research from a survey of 1,500 CEOs globally, she set out a strategic picture that HR and TA professionals need to understand if they want to be taken seriously as business partners.
For the fifteenth year in a row, growth is the number one priority for CEOs. But how they plan to achieve it has shifted significantly.
Only 20% of surveyed CEOs now rank workforce as one of their top three strategic priorities - down from 31% in 2022. CEO confidence, meanwhile, sits at just 49% on the Gartner index.
Peter Aykens, Gartner's chief of research, has described this moment as a collision of three "wicked messes": how to grow amid global volatility, how to capture real value from AI investment, and how to integrate people and technology into a coherent workforce. His assessment of the combined weight of today's uncertainty - surpassing the financial crisis, Brexit and the pandemic combined - prompted a sharp intake of breath from the webinar audience.
The implications for TA are direct. On AI specifically, 79% of CEOs see it as the biggest disruptor to their industries, yet only 7% believe their CHRO has sufficient AI capability. That gap between expectation and confidence is both a risk and an opportunity for talent leaders willing to step into it.
LinkedIn's latest economic data paints a complicated picture. Hiring across advanced economies is down 20–35% compared to pre-pandemic levels, driven primarily by economic uncertainty and monetary policy shifts rather than AI. Unemployment in the UK has risen again; vacancy levels have fallen again.
And yet - and this is the paradox that many in the room knew well - organisations are still struggling to find the right talent. An NHS recruiter Emma spoke with recently described a technical role that previously attracted eight to ten applications now receiving three hundred. Volume is up. Quality and fit remain elusive.
On top of this, the rise of AI-enabled job applications is creating genuine process strain. Emma's practical suggestion for teams overwhelmed by application volume: remove open text boxes and covering letters, and introduce structured assessment questions instead. They significantly reduce the number of applications teams need to manually review.
There is also a generational shift in the types of skills employers need. LinkedIn data shows that roles requiring AI literacy in the US grew 70% year-over-year, and 1.3 million new AI-enabled jobs have emerged globally in the past two years.
Emma described this as a "new collar era" - a workforce that blends knowledge work, advanced technical skills, and distinctly human strengths. The number one skill on the rise in the UK on LinkedIn?
Not AI literacy. Not data science. Relationship building.
Emma shared headline findings from The Talent Labs' eleventh annual talent trends report - a 70-page benchmark study drawn from their community of 2,000+ practitioners.
The biggest shift: AI and automation has jumped to the top of TA's priority list, claimed by 41% of respondents (up from 18% last year). In 2025, candidate experience held that position. Workforce planning has also risen sharply, reflecting the constant reforecasting that teams are now doing in response to external uncertainty.
The most striking drop: ED&I has fallen from a consistent top-three priority - where it sat for roughly a decade - to under 10% of respondents listing it as a priority. Emma was careful to note that this doesn't mean ED&I is being devalued. Practice is actually maturing; 47% of respondents are now Disability Confident employers, up from 35% last year. But it appears to have moved, for many organisations, from strategic priority to business as usual.
On workload and resource, the picture is sobering. 74% of recruiters are managing eleven or more open roles simultaneously. 38% are carrying more than twenty-one, despite only 24% viewing that as sustainable. Talent teams remain lean: 66% have fewer than ten people, and only 22% expect to grow headcount this year. The phrase that one AI tool offered when asked to summarise the 2026 report - "doing even more with even less"- felt uncomfortably accurate.
One theme that surfaced repeatedly across both the webinar content and Jobtrain's own recent research was hiring manager capability. Emma noted that hiring manager training is currently the most popular offering The Talent Labs delivers to its members - and that demand has spiked sharply in line with incoming employment legislation.
Jobtrain's Giles Heckstall-Smith referenced findings from five independent hackathon sessions held with 100 UK TA leaders, facilitated by Jobtrain at a Talent Labs event in April. Four out of five groups independently cited hiring manager engagement as a critical gap in candidate experience - from slow decision-making and inconsistent standards to a failure to complete feedback within the ATS. "The challenge is obvious," Giles noted. "You've got so many middle managers - how do we engage them, inform them, train them, increase their capability?"
It's a question without an easy answer, but one that organisations can no longer afford to leave unanswered, particularly as the Employment Rights Bill puts greater weight on the quality and consistency of hiring decisions.
Emma closed with a clear prescription for talent professionals navigating all of this. The top skills for 2026 and beyond: human-AI collaboration, experience-led talent design, data-driven learning pathways, and scenario-based workforce planning. The framing she offered was succinct: "2026 is all about being data-led, AI-ready, and working across TA, talent management and talent development as one ecosystem."
Tomorrow's talent leaders, she argued, need to bring the whole talent lifecycle together — not just fill vacancies, but advise on whether to hire at all, how to redesign roles, where automation can take on tasks, and how to build the human capability that technology cannot replace.
That last point felt like the session's defining idea. In a world reshaped by AI, relationship building is the number one skill on the rise in the UK. The industry's most sophisticated data keeps pointing back to people.
Jobtrain and The Talent Labs run a regular series of webinars, roundtables and research sessions for talent acquisition professionals. If candidate experience, hiring manager engagement or ATS automation are on your agenda, our Candidate Experience in Talent Acquisition research report - produced with The Talent Labs and based on insights from 100 UK TA leaders - is free to download.
Q: What are the top talent acquisition priorities in 2026? According to The Talent Labs' annual survey, AI and automation is the top priority for 41% of TA teams in 2026, up from 18% the previous year. Workforce planning has also risen significantly, while ED&I has fallen from the top three for the first time in a decade.
Q: Why is hiring manager engagement a challenge in talent acquisition? Research from 100 UK TA leaders found that four out of five independent groups cited hiring manager engagement as a critical gap — including slow decision-making, inconsistent standards, and failure to provide timely candidate feedback. Incoming employment legislation is increasing the urgency of addressing this.
Q: What skills do talent acquisition professionals need in 2026? The key emerging skills for TA teams in 2026 include human-AI collaboration, experience-led talent design, data-driven decision-making, and workforce scenario planning.