The global state of tech talent.

01 The great reset

From boom and bust to a permanently resized company

Tell the story from headlines alone and you get layoffs, a hiring freeze, a market on ice. Look at the graph and a sharper story appears: hiring did not freeze, it reset. Global hiring peaked in 2022, then fell for three straight years to 82 in 2025, below its pre-pandemic level. That is not a pause you wait out. It is the new floor. Here is what the data shows, and what to do about it whether you are building, hiring or investing.

Global new-hire pace, all functions, indexed to 2019 = 100. New roles started per calendar year.

02 AI and the mix

The AI code apocalypse did not come for engineers

For two years the fear inside every engineering org was the same: AI comes for engineers first. Look at the hiring data and the opposite happened. Technical hiring recovered fully by 2024, with Engineering (other) running at 113 against its 2019 baseline and Software, Data & Technical at 102, while Management sat at 93 and Sales at 92. Within a smaller pie, technical roles now command their largest share on record. The function everyone worried would shrink is the one still growing.

Hiring by function, 2024 versus 2019, indexed to 2019 = 100. Emerald marks functions above baseline.

Engineering is the only function hiring above its 2019 baseline by a wide margin, at 112.8. Cut headcount plans by function, not by a flat percentage across the org.

03 The senior core

The engineering core is getting senior, and the ladder is narrowing

If you are twenty-five and trying to break into engineering, the market got harder in a specific way. The entry and junior share of technical hires fell from 59% in 2019 to 47% in 2025, while the mid and senior IC share climbed from 33% to 43%. The bottleneck has moved from writing code to reviewing it, and that changes who gets hired next.

• Entry and junior share dropped from 59% in 2019 to 47% in 2025.
• Mid and senior IC share climbed from 33% to 43% over the same period.
• Senior IC hiring is up roughly 40% on 2019, while entry-level hiring is down almost 40% from its 2022 peak.
• The shift removes the training ground junior hires used to occupy.

Share of technical hires by seniority band, 2019 to 2025. Entry & junior, mid & senior IC, lead/director/exec.

A 12-point swing from entry-level to mid and senior IC in six years means the traditional junior-to-senior pipeline is no longer the default path into a technical career. Plan hiring and career paths accordingly.

04 Inside engineering

The role map is being redrawn around AI leverage

Draw the org chart you had in 2021 and it is already out of date. The AI and ML share of new technical roles has grown five-fold since 2019, from 0.9% to 4.5%, with the steepest climb in the last two years. Front-end specialist titles moved the opposite way, peaking near 2.1% in 2021 and declining every year since to 1.5%. Read that correctly: the narrow front-end craft role is being absorbed into broader builder roles, not eliminated.

Share of new technical roles matching each pattern, 2019 to 2025. AI & ML titles versus front-end specialist titles.

AI and ML titles have overtaken front-end specialist titles since 2022 and the gap is widening. If your role map is still built on 2021 job families, redraw it now.

05 Talent liquidity

Design is the most liquid function in the market

Ask which function is about to lose the most people and most leaders guess engineering. They are wrong. TechTree scores every current role for flight risk, the modeled likelihood the person moves soon, and Design and Creative tops the map at 71.7% High or Very High, more than ten points above every other function. Business & Ops sits at 61.1%, Management at 59.5%, Software, Data & Technical at 59.3%, and Engineering and Sales tie at 57.8%.

Flight risk by function: share of current roles scored High or Very High.

06 Talent liquidity by seniority

Staff engineers are the stickiest talent in the market

Spend retention budget evenly across levels and you are wasting most of it. Inside technical roles, flight risk falls sharply as seniority climbs. Junior engineers are highly in play; staff-level engineers are the hardest to move. Follow the curve, not the org chart.

• Level 1 juniors sit at 67% High or Very High flight risk, peaking at 70% at level 2.
• Risk then declines through the middle levels to a low near 45% at level 6.
• It ticks back up again at the executive level.
• Retention budget should follow this curve, not spread evenly across it.

Flight risk by seniority, technical roles. Percent scored High or Very High, level 1 (junior) to 7 (exec).

07 The talent map

The world has two poles of technical talent, not one

Build your sourcing strategy around the US alone and you are ignoring a pool nearly its size. Indexed with the US at 100, India comes in at 94.9, nearly the same size and in a class of its own. Treat it as a second pole, not an overflow market.

• India indexes at 94.9 against a US baseline of 100, nearly the same size.
• Below the two poles sits a long tail: Brazil near 20, the UK at 19.
• France sits at 13, with Canada and Germany near 12.
• That second pool carries its own liquidity and its own competitive pressure.

Talent size versus liquidity by country. Size indexed to US = 100 (log scale); vertical axis is percent at High or Very High flight risk.

08 The liquidity outlier

China sits alone at the top of the liquidity scale

If you have a retention plan for China that looks like your retention plan for Germany, rewrite it. On the same map, one country stands apart. China's technical workforce scores 88.6% High or Very High flight risk, more than twenty points above almost every other market. Most hubs cluster in a tight band: Mexico at 54.6%, India at 56.9%, the US at 63.6%, Poland at 68.5%. China is a mid-tier hub by scale, comparable to Germany or the Netherlands, but by liquidity it is in a category by itself.

09 Concentration

Technical share hit a record, even as total hiring fell

Two things are true at once, and both matter for planning next year's budget. Technical roles now make up 21.2% of all global hiring, the highest point in TechTree's series. Hold that against the headline: total hiring pace fell to 82 in 2025. The pie shrank. Technical's slice of it did not.

• Technical share climbed from 18.6% in 2019 to 20.3% in 2024 to 21.2% in 2025.
• Total hiring pace, all functions, fell to 82 in 2025.
• The pie is smaller and the technical slice is bigger.
• Management and Sales hire below their pre-pandemic pace while technical hiring has fully recovered.

Technical share of all global hiring, 2019 to 2025. Computer & Mathematical occupation family.

Technical hiring claimed 21.2% of a shrinking pie in 2025, up from 18.6% in 2019. Every other function is now competing for a smaller share of a smaller budget. Plan headcount with that in mind.

10 What to do with this

Job postings tell you who is hiring. Flight risk tells you who is about to move.

Most talent reports stop at demand. This one goes further. Flight risk scores the people already in seats, across a graph of 1.4 billion career records and roughly 1 billion individuals worldwide. Turn that map from a company's point of view and it is a retention heatmap. Turn it from a recruiter's point of view and it is a sourcing map. Only one of those is a target list, and knowing which one you are holding changes what you do next.

11 Strategic recommendations

What to do before your next planning cycle

The reset, the senior core and the liquidity map are not three separate stories. They are one labour market that has gotten smaller, more senior and more prone to sudden movement. Here is what that means for three groups making headcount and sourcing decisions right now.

12 Method & confidence

Transparent, tiered, and honest about the modeled layer.

Trust the headline numbers because you can see how they were built. This report draws on TechTree's proprietary workforce knowledge graph, roughly 1.4 billion career records and 1.0 billion individuals globally, with company, funding, education and geography linkages. Population is global, all countries. Hiring is measured as new roles started per calendar year. Tier 1 covers hard employment history, role dates, seniority, geography, tenure, company and funding links, used for all headline findings. Tier 2 covers modeled fields, the flight-risk model, salary model and function classification from titles, used for the liquidity signal and role mix and framed as modeled throughout. Tier 3, sparse self-reported data, is excluded. The 2025 year is complete but subject to reporting lag, so recent figures may firm up over time; relative shares and trends are robust to this lag. Data as of 8 July 2026, drawn from the TechTree workforce knowledge graph.