It happens every year.
Candidates in January are fired up, refreshed from the holiday break and asking themselves the big career questions: “What do I really want? What more can I be doing? Where can I learn more? Where can I earn more?” This isn’t just a feeling – it’s a statistical fact. January sees more job applications than any other month. The talent is motivated, tanned and ready to move.
While the market is flooded with the most motivated and rarely available talent, hiring managers are still shaking the sand out of their shoes.
They trickle back from holidays mid-to-late month, spend February resetting strategy, then when they get their act together and realise they need to hire they’ve missed the boat. They’re fishing at the bottom of the barrel, fighting over the leftovers.
This is a predictable market cycle. January is the most active month of Candidate activity and the least active month of Employer activity.
While reactive hiring managers are scrambling in February, the smart money has already won. They’re not just filling a role; they’re securing a competitive advantage and starting the year on a leading foot.
Between 20th Dec ‘24 -20th Jan ‘25 our Active Candidate channels rose by 212%. This coming January, we are again inundated with pre-logged interviews with top candidates (who we’ve been chasing all year), for early January meetings to discuss their new role in 2026.
We have Client orders to go live with their roles from the first week of January (even if they are still holidaying) in order to catch the best candidates.
The annual migration is coming! Don’t let your Q1 be defined by desperation hires.
PREDICTIONS
From where I’m sitting, the patterns emerging for 2026 are getting too interesting to ignore.
It feels like we’re walking into a series of elegant contradictions. We’re about to see a world where anyone can build software, but where the value of that software is judged on a razor’s edge. A world where companies are desperate for talent, yet their own hiring process has become their worst enemy.
So, consider what follows less of a prophecy and more of a ‘dispatch from the trenches’. These are the shifts I’m seeing, the quiet conversations I’m having, and a few thoughts on where the ground might be moving under our feet.
Hopefully it helps!
Tech Predictions
- The “Canva-ization” of Apps.
The narrative in founder pitches is a significant indicator of where software is heading. Pitches that used to start with “we’re the Uber of X” now begin with ‘we’re the Canva of X’. This signals a powerful shift – allowing civilians to easily build their own apps, designs, and websites, spawning a democratized creative revolution.
This movement gives rise to the “citizen developer“— allowing anyone to build custom apps and automate workflows using low-code and no-code (LCNC) platforms. The scale of this shift is massive, considering there are roughly 20 million Software Engineers on planet earth (~0.002% of the world’s population). Imagine what technology, and what the world will look like when anyone with an idea and internet access can build an application without a team or funding.
- Personal Software to explode!
Some of the sharpest developers I speak to (top 5% in Australia) want to join a “Software 3.0” company. They want to be the ones building the platforms where these citizen developers can create their own deeply personalized apps.
Will this trend help or hinder the tech skills shortage?
On one hand, it lowers the barrier to entry into the wonderful world of software development. On the other, we’re going to see a lot of these apps being hacked. Good for freelancers! They’ll be busy ensuring these apps are secure, scalable, and reliable.
- Technology = community ☺️
Following on from these trends, we’ll see mini apps on platforms (like Base44, Wabi, Loveable, RelevanceAI etc.) able to talk to each other and pass context between different apps. And this will create real communities around niche interests. What social media was kind of intended to be…
Over the holidays I’m building a Fly Fishing app for my buddies and I. Maybe it attracts some other like-minded anglers? Maybe they can teach us how to actually fish?
4. Company 2.0 – ‘Mitosis.’
Our friends at Redactive scaled and successfully sold their company after 18 months to move their team’s focus on a bigger product in a bigger problem space, and Quarterzip was born. Their investors obviously loved it, though more especially their team (which we proudly helped build) absolutely adored it! They get to work on an entirely new technology, problem space and customer – their levels of motivation (and loyalty) are sky high. I see this “Mitosis” happening more and more.
- Word of the year…
I guessed “Agentic” last year. Was I right? Was that too easy? I don’t know. Anyway here goes, for 2026… “Compression.”
Hiring Predictions
- CVs to be flipped upside down.
What you have built, designed, or shipped in AI is more important than your last 5 years of employment. Especially in Engineering, Product & Marketing. Show me how you have used AI and I’ll call you before needing to read page 2 of your CV.
If you haven’t yet lent in to AI, you’re falling down the list, fast.
- Salaries to rise… for those using AI well.
See above, if you haven’t dealt with AI your salary at your next company is at risk of being lower than what you’re currently on.
The stronger your fluidity in AI the more in demand you are… > See supply vs. demand.
- Welcome to Grindcore and the “996” 🏋️
Founded in China (before becoming illegal due to horrible conditions) and adopted by Silicon Valley, “9am to 9pm, 6 days per week” is how companies are winning their race in AI, and interestingly attracting candidates with ultra high ambition and motivation. Two of our clients unofficially adopt it. I was skeptical, though their talent bars are arguably the highest in Aus.. You’ll soon be competing with more and more of these companies who are conceptually twice as productive. - ‘Sickies’ to rise as Trial Interviews surge.
2026 will see the rise of more companies using trial periods as their final interview round. This could be two days or a full week, where candidates (who are compensated) work with the hiring team. It is the premium option for both candidates and clients who get a raw and realistic view of each other. - The triumphant return of the Cover Letter.
Shortlisting decisions are being made on cover letters over CVs. Where candidates can convey a story or a connection to the role and company. Before 2024 I honestly had never read one cover letter, now it’s what I click on first.
And since auto-appliers are growing (programs that edit your CV to the specific Job Ad and apply en masse), the value of a CV is falling. This has created a major problem: with more inbound applications, fewer applicants get a response, so more of them use auto-appliers to apply to more jobs and so the cycle goes.
- The most in-demand candidates will be…
Can I have 3 guesses???
- Forward-Deployed Engineers: They are the bridge between an AI company and its clients. They embed with the client’s team to diagnose real-business problems, translate those challenges into a technical solution the AI can solve, and then champion that solution internally to build trust and drive adoption. Job listings for forward-deployed engineers rose 800% between January and September this year.
- Mid level, AI fluent Software Engineers: Those who haven’t yet been institutionalised. They have side hustle(s), personal projects and are highly valuable ($150-$170k base salary range). If you can’t afford them, they will soon be your company’s ultra lean, ultra fast competition.
- Designers: A recent study of 3 million job postings by Autodesk revealed that Design skills have overtaken technical skills in AI job postings. Why? Because we made AI powerful, which was a technical problem, but we forgot to make it usable, which is a human (design) problem.
- The least in-demand candidates will be…
Engineering Managers.
Sorry. I know, it’s so tough for experienced engineering managers not quite yet at Director level. They are in a void. We try our best to help our EM friends though the recurring feedback from hiring companies is that many have low AI skills and unrealistic pay expectations. We are in a world that needs builders, not managers right now. - Get the popcorn ready for Recruiter Blacklists 🍿
So many Recruiters’ use of AI has annoyed the crap out of candidates.
More and more great candidates are deleting their LI profiles and apparently asking particular recruiters to delete their information.
We’ll start seeing profiles saying “Do not contact me if you are from Hays or Randstad” and publicly naming individuals and companies who continue to annoy. I’m here for it. - Emerging Role Titles.
Compression Engineer, Marchitect, Chief Automation Officer, Design Engineer, AI Infra Engineer, AI Ethicist , AI Adoption Consultant, Head of Digital Trust & Safety.
- Logo fishing 🎣
Companies who purely rely on hiring candidates from particular Logo’s will lose. My friends at Canva say they get between 20-30 linkedin inmails PER DAY!
Those obsessing over logos aren’t fishing in a talent pool, or even a pond, they’re competing in a puddle – a puddle where people talk, actively share the ‘Logo Fisher’ names and see you coming a mile away.
- Junior Engineer hiring to (finally) rebound
Poor juniors, they’ve really been smashed.
During Covid they were being onboarded remotely. After Covid they were being let go. Now, let 2026 be their year!
- Shopify, GitHub and Cloudflare are each hiring 1,000 interns in 2026
- OpenAI, Anthropic and Netflix who only ever hired senior software engineers have started to onboard new grads recently, too.
Final note
After an ‘Agentic’ year, I see 2026 being a humane one – where its winners are those who invest in the value of trust, are empathetic in uncertainty, proactive over aggressive and understand that treating people well is the smartest strategy of all.
Here’s to a wonderful year!