‘What we're seeing is a fundamental shift in expectations on both sides of the hiring process’
More than a third of U.S. employers now say artificial intelligence will grow their headcount, not shrink it, according to a recent report.
More than 9 in 10 (92%) of employers in the U.S. report some level of AI adoption, and 35% say AI will increase their total headcount going forward – with 24% saying this shift has already begun, finds ZipRecruiter.
AI fluency baseline hiring requirement
Along with the projected increase in hiring, AI is reshaping what employers look for in candidates just as much as how many candidates they hire, according to ZipRecruiter’s survey of more than 1,000 verified talent acquisition professionals and hiring managers conducted in June.
Nearly two-third (64%) of employers told ZipRecruiter that AI is changing the specific skills they screen for, and 74% now call AI skills a strong advantage or an outright requirement for at least some roles — with 13% requiring them company-wide.
Half of employers expect candidates to already be practical or advanced AI users before they walk in the door.
At the same time, the report found that "human" competencies have not been pushed aside.
Employers say the following skills have all grown more important over the past year:
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critical thinking (65%)
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judgment and decision-making (59%)
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creativity (58%)
Workflow automation (60%) and data analysis (60%) have also become more important, say the employers.
Formal AI training lags
Despite raising the bar on what workers are expected to know and produce, most employers are not formally teaching them how to get there, ZipRecruiter found.
Just 22% of employers provide mandatory AI training for all employees, and another 23% limit that training to specific departments.
The remaining 55% rely on optional resources (34%) or offer no training at all (17%) — even as 57% of employers say they now expect more productivity from workers because of AI.
This is the case even though 38% of employers have shifted basic data entry and processing away from entry-level workers and onto AI, and 31% say AI has driven them to raise experience requirements for entry-level roles.
ZipRecruiter noted this mirrors findings in its separate graduate-hiring research, where experience remains the clearest predictor of landing a first job.
Seven in 10 Canadians including – 75% of those aged 25–34 – believe the country is still not doing enough to prepare young adults for work, according to a previous Meridian Credit Union report.
Gender gap with AI growth
ZipRecruiter also found a notable split in sentiment by respondent gender. Nearly 2 in 5 (39%) male respondents expect AI to grow their company's headcount over the next three to five years, compared with 30% of female respondents.
Male respondents were also more likely to say their baseline productivity expectations had risen because of AI (63% versus 50% of female respondents).
The report suggests this reflects broader patterns in which women are less likely to use AI in job applications or to learn AI skills in school, but more likely to weigh the technology's ethical implications — a divide HR leaders may want to account for when designing AI training and change-management programs to avoid uneven adoption across their workforce.
Two distinct paths with hiring
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report projects that AI and related technologies will create 170 million new roles globally while displacing roughly 92 million existing ones by 2030. The organisation identifies a cluster of brand-new job titles driving that growth, including AI integration specialists who connect AI tools to enterprise systems, AI operations engineers who monitor and maintain deployed AI systems, AI product managers, and automation architects who design workflows combining AI agents with human checkpoints.
Meanwhile, PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analysed more than one billion job postings across six continents, found AI is splitting hiring into two distinct paths. "Professionalised" roles — where AI automates routine tasks so human judgement and expertise are emphasized — are growing faster than roles "democratised" by AI, where the technology simply makes a job easier for non-experts to perform. Employers most able to deploy AI effectively are expanding hiring faster than their peers, with growing emphasis on judgement, creativity and leadership.
Nearly half (48%) of 1,500 hiring managers surveyed in Canada predict AI will help increase headcount in the next two years, not decrease, according to a previous report.
