By Alexis Medina
Director of Client Delivery
I recently had the opportunity to attend Indeed’s FutureWorks 2026 conference, where talent leaders, economists, and industry experts came together to explore the forces shaping the future of work. AI understandably dominated many of the conversations, but one of my biggest takeaways from the conference wasn’t about technology. It was about people—and whether employers will have enough of them, with the right skills, to do the work ahead.
Today’s U.S. labor market is often described as “low-hire, low-fire,” with employers remaining cautious about adding headcount while layoffs and quits are also relatively minimal. But beneath that relative stability is a longer-term challenge: labor supply. Aging populations, retirements, reduced labor force participation, and skills mismatches are creating pressure within the available workforce, while demand for more skilled and senior talent continues to grow.
At the same time, AI has changed what people can accomplish, how candidates and employers are evaluating each other, and how recruiters are spending their time.
Taken together, these shifts should change the question talent leaders are asking from “How will AI replace work?” to, “How can we use technology to expand what people can do—while finding, attracting, and keeping the talent the future of work requires?”
Here are five key concepts discussed at FutureWorks that talent leaders can use to shape their workforce planning.
1. A slower hiring market doesn’t mean talent is easy to find.
When hiring slows, it’s easy to assume recruiting should be easier. More available candidates plus fewer open jobs should mean less competition for talent, right?
Not necessarily.
National labor market data can tell us a lot about the overall environment, but it can’t tell an employer whether the right person exists for a specific role, skill set, shift, wage, or location. FutureWorks highlighted that demand isn’t shifting uniformly. Competition remains stronger for certain skills and more senior talent even as other parts of the market stay relatively flat.
That distinction matters because the obstacle to successful hiring isn’t always at the top of the funnel.
Before investing more in attraction strategies, employers should diagnose where the constraint actually sits. Do enough people know about the opportunity? Are qualified candidates interested but dropping out? Have job requirements narrowed the available pool unnecessarily? Or is there genuinely not enough talent with the required capabilities in that market?
Each of those challenges requires a different response—from stronger attraction or process improvements to rethinking requirements or addressing a true supply gap.
For talent leaders, that means looking below the macro headlines. Local market data, role-level supply and demand, compensation, schedules, and candidate behavior can tell a very different story from national hiring trends.
Flat demand doesn’t mean unlimited talent. And when supply is the real constraint, simply sourcing harder won’t solve it.
2. Expand the talent pool by rethinking role requirements.
One question came up repeatedly at FutureWorks: What does someone truly need to bring to the job on Day 1, and what can the employer teach them once they’re there? It’s a simple question with potentially significant implications for talent supply.
Job descriptions have a tendency to accumulate requirements over time. Experience in a particular industry. Familiarity with a specific system. A certain number of years in an equivalent role. A credential that may have historically been useful but isn’t necessarily predictive of someone’s success today.
In a tightening labor market, every role requirement has a cost: it removes people from the potential talent pool.
That doesn’t mean compromising on talent quality. It means being more precise about which requirements are truly necessary. FutureWorks attendees were challenged to look at what candidates can do in practice rather than relying solely on what appears on paper.
Consider a hard-to-fill technician position. An employer may traditionally look for someone who has already performed that exact job in the same industry. But often, industry-specific knowledge can be taught. Someone with a strong mechanical foundation, problem-solving ability, and willingness to learn is likely to succeed in the role, even if they haven’t held the specific job title before.
That’s where skills-first hiring becomes more than a sourcing tactic. It becomes a workforce strategy. Hire for what must be present. Train what can be built.
3. Use AI to return capacity—not simply increase output.
One of the AI themes explored in FutureWorks sessions that resonated most with me was the importance of using AI to create capacity. Put simply: Don’t give people more work. Give them more tools.
The AI in recruiting conversation often begins with automation: Which tasks can the technology perform? How much time would be saved by automating those tasks? What additional output can we generate?
Those are useful questions, but I think there’s another one that matters just as much: What do we want people to do with the capacity AI gives back to them?
If AI or an automated workflow saves a recruiter 10 hours each week and we immediately fill those 10 hours with more administrative work, we’ve increased throughput, not value.
The greater opportunity is to use technology to absorb repeatable tasks so people can spend more time on work that benefits from human judgment—relationship building, strategy, creativity, and problem-solving. In talent acquisition, technology can and should support activities like scheduling, screening, and content development while creating more room for meaningful human interaction.
Surprisingly, despite the enormous amount of conversation about AI among TA practitioners, employers still aren’t adopting it consistently—or aren’t talking openly about it with candidates. Indeed Hiring Lab reported that only 6% of U.S. job postings mentioned AI or an adjacent keyword as of July 2026, and PeopleScout’s recent candidate experience research found 65% of candidates heard nothing about AI from any employer they applied to. This suggests that many organizations are still determining where and how AI fits into their recruitment process, which creates an opportunity to be intentional about adoption.
Instead of starting with “What can we automate?” talent leaders should be asking “Where could technology return capacity to our people—and where would we create the most value by reinvesting that time?”
The goal isn’t more work. It’s more capacity for the work that matters.
4. AI is reshaping your employer brand narrative.
Traditionally, candidates have visited the employer’s career site, read employee reviews, and searched social channels, to see what current and former employees say, evaluate the visibility and credibility of company leaders, and determine whether a company’s promise matches the lived employee experience. And so, for years, employers have invested in making their career sites easier to find, building compelling employer value propositions (EVPs), and creating recruitment marketing content that shows candidates what it’s like to work for them.
But AI has changed search behavior, giving employers less control over their brand narrative. Instead of visiting a career site and navigating through employer-created content, a candidate can ask a specific question and receive an answer synthesized from multiple sources. The employer may no longer get the first—or only—opportunity to frame the story.
Your employer brand isn’t only what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it’s what candidates—and the technology helping them research you—can verify.
For talent leaders, this means broadening your employer brand efforts beyond the career site. Monitor reviews and third-party conversations. Consider leadership visibility and employee advocacy. Think about the questions candidates are likely to ask AI about your organization—and whether the answers they’ll find match the experience you’re promising.
Recruitment marketing can create awareness, but it won’t compensate for a disconnect between the EVP and the lived employee experience.
5. Consider your hiring process from the candidate’s perspective.
Employers naturally measure recruitment outcomes from the organization’s perspective: How long did it take to fill the role? When did the candidate accept? When did they start? How quickly did the new hire become productive?
At FutureWorks, we explored a small but distinct shift in perspective—measuring success from Apply to First Paycheck.
For employers, an employee’s start date marks the beginning of productivity. But for the worker, particularly in hourly or high-volume roles, the economic benefit of taking the job doesn’t begin until the first paycheck arrives.
This small shift illustrates a larger point: What changes when we design and measure the hiring experience from the candidate’s side rather than our own?
Suddenly, process speed isn’t just an efficiency metric. Communication isn’t simply a recruiting task. Compensation, scheduling, flexibility, development opportunities, manager interactions, and job requirements aren’t separate considerations—they’re all part of the talent proposition.
What does this mean for talent leaders? If candidate fallout is a challenge within your hiring process, it may not be a recruiting problem.
Before investing in another source or adding more candidates to the top of the funnel, ask why people aren’t choosing—or staying with—the opportunity being offered. Is the schedule competitive? Is compensation aligned with the market? Are requirements unnecessarily restrictive? Is the process asking too much of candidates? Can they see a future for themselves in the organization?
The goal isn’t simply to move candidates through the process faster. It’s to design an opportunity—and a hiring experience—that gives them a stronger reason to choose you.
Designing for the human advantage
The real value of a conference like FutureWorks isn’t any single trend, statistic, or new technology. It’s seeing the connections between the changes happening at the same time.
Based on these key takeaways from FutureWorks, I challenge talent leaders to ask themselves these three questions:
- What do employees truly need to know or be able to do on Day 1—and what can be taught post-hire?
- What tasks should AI take off recruiters’ plates, and what higher-value work should replace it?
- Are we designing jobs and hiring experiences around the talent available today—or adapting hiring models built for a different labor market?
Talent supply is tightening over the long term. Candidates have more ways to evaluate employers. Expectations around trust, respect, and transparency are rising. And AI-powered tools are enabling people and teams to accomplish more with the capacity they already have.
The opportunity is to redesign work so technology expands human capability—and redesign talent strategies to support tomorrow’s workforce.
