Job Market Insights: February 2026

The headline: hiring is up, but the rules changed

January 2026 added 143,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, and unemployment held steady at 4.0%. Those are decent numbers. But dig into the BLS data and the picture gets more specific — and more useful if you're actively looking.

Healthcare added 44,000 jobs. Government added 32,000. Retail picked up 34,000 (seasonal carryover). Tech? Flat. Finance? Barely moved.

If your resume still leads with "dynamic professional seeking opportunities in a fast-paced environment," you're losing to people who tailor for specific roles in growing sectors.

Where the jobs actually are

The sectors adding headcount in early 2026:

Healthcare keeps hiring. 44,000 jobs in January alone. Registered nurses, medical assistants, and healthcare administrators are in constant demand. The aging population isn't slowing down, and neither is the hiring. If you're in healthcare and not getting callbacks, it's a resume problem, not a market problem.

Government is quietly booming. 32,000 positions, mostly at state and local levels. Public sector roles — administrators, analysts, social workers — don't get the same attention as tech jobs, but they're stable and growing. The application process is different though. Government ATS systems (like USAJOBS) are notoriously picky about formatting.

Construction is steady. 8,000 jobs added, and the sector is running above its 2025 average. Infrastructure spending and housing demand are keeping project managers, civil engineers, and skilled trades busy.

Tech is... complicated. Big Tech layoffs got all the headlines in 2024-2025, and hiring hasn't fully recovered. But startups and mid-market companies are hiring for AI/ML engineers, data scientists, and security roles. The jobs are there. They're just not at the companies you'd expect.

What's not in the BLS numbers

The data tells you where jobs are. It doesn't tell you how people are getting them. Here's what we're seeing:

ATS rejection rates haven't improved. Over 75% of resumes are still filtered out before a human sees them. The systems haven't gotten smarter — they've just gotten more ubiquitous. Even small companies (50-200 employees) are using Greenhouse or Lever now.

AI-assisted applications are flooding the market. Recruiters report seeing 2-3x more applications per role compared to 2024. Many of these are low-effort, AI-generated blasts. The result: hiring managers are spending less time per application, which means your resume has even less time to make an impression. We're talking 6 seconds, and that's generous.

Remote job competition is global. A remote software engineering role posted by a US company now gets applications from 15+ countries. If you're applying for remote roles, you're competing with a much larger pool than two years ago. Location-specific roles (hybrid, on-site) have notably less competition.

The resume gap nobody talks about

Here's the thing that frustrates us: there's a growing gap between people who tailor their resumes for each application and people who don't.

The tailored group gets 3-4x more callbacks. That's not a Huntly marketing number — it's consistent across every study we've seen and every pattern in our own data. The gap is widening because tailoring is getting easier (thanks to AI tools) and the people who do it are pulling further ahead.

If you're sending the same PDF to 30 companies, you're fighting with one hand behind your back.

Three things to do this month

1. Check which ATS your target companies use. We have company-specific ATS tips for 85+ companies. Knowing whether a company uses Workday vs. Greenhouse changes how you format your resume. Small thing. Big difference.

2. Lead with the right keywords — not just any keywords. "Project management" is too broad. "Agile project management for cross-functional SaaS teams" is what gets past ATS filters and catches a recruiter's eye. Look at the job description. Use their language. If they say "stakeholder management," don't write "working with people."

3. Tailor every application. Yes, every one. This used to mean 30 minutes of manual rewriting per job. It doesn't anymore. Huntly's resume tailoring does it in 30 seconds. Paste the job description, get a tailored resume with an ATS score. The bar for "I don't have time to tailor" has dropped to zero.

What to watch next month

March is historically when hiring picks up after the Q1 planning cycle. We'll be tracking:

• Whether tech hiring starts recovering (early signals say yes, but slowly)
• How AI-related roles continue to grow across non-tech industries
• The impact of return-to-office mandates on job switching patterns

We'll publish updated numbers in March. If you want resume tips specific to your role, check our resume examples — we have pages for 200+ roles with the exact ATS keywords and skills each one needs.

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Data sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary, January 2026. Huntly platform data from anonymized user patterns.