Physical therapists surged +1,473%. Digital marketing roles collapsed -95%. The hiring data is not moving in one direction. It is moving in two.
That line comes from McKinsey’s State of AI 2025 report and it is more precise than most AI-and-jobs commentary produced this year. It does not say AI is harmless. It says the redistribution is already happening, and it is happening by role, not by sector.
SignalHire tracks recruiter search behavior in real time. If a hiring manager searches on a professional contact database, this registers in the data before a job posting is written, before requisitons are approved, even before a LinkedIn job ad goes live. Searching for a potential employee can anticipate hiring way before they publish any Jobs (and invest money), with the time lag between these events being three to six weeks.
Between January and April 2025, and the same period in 2026, SignalHire logged tens of thousands of recruiter searches across five countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India. The comparison between those two periods reveals a jobs market in the middle of a structural reorganization. Not a collapse. Not a boom. A sorting.
The WEF Future of Jobs Report 2026 projects 170 million new roles could be created by 2030 even as 92 million are displaced, a net gain of 78 million jobs concentrated in technology, healthcare, and the green economy. SignalHire’s data does not contradict that projection. It shows what it looks like in recruiter behavior right now, before it becomes a headline.
What the Global Data Shows
Across all five countries combined, the top two surging roles are Physical Therapist (+1,473%) and Physical Therapist Assistant (+5,717%). The top two declining roles are Software Engineer (-68%) and Digital Marketing Specialist (-54%).
That combination is not random. It maps exactly to a division targeted by both the WEF and Goldman in their workforce forecasting: jobs for which the demand refuses to be supplanted by an AI, either because they require physical relocation, regulated clinical judgment or long-term relationship management. Hence, roles whose purposes are similar to what large language models and AI workflow tools now more or less do, content, code review, data pattern findings, are losing recruiter interest at speed.
The pattern repeats across geographies, although the precise roles differ. A recruiter in Canada is not looking for the same positions as a recruiter sitting in India. But both are going in the same directional strategy.
United States: Healthcare Has Broken Away
The US data is the most dramatic in the dataset. Physical Therapist searches grew +1,473% year over year. Physical Therapist Assistant grew +5,717%. Occupational Therapist, not in the top ten in 2025, rose +56% to rank sixth in 2026.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that jobs for physical therapists will be among the most impenetrable and abundant fields throughout all occupations through 2033, with an estimated growth rate of 14% over the decade or about 13,600 new jobs each year. SignalHire’s recruiter search data is on the same trajectory as those predictions only significantly faster. The projected shortage of software engineers is not materializing fast enough, as hiring bosses refuse to wait for it to end. Hiring managers are not waiting for the projected shortage to materialize. They are sourcing now, ahead of it.
Why physical therapy specifically?
Several factors converge.
- Share of the US population age 65 and over by year By 2030, individuals aged 65 and older will account for 21% of total population
- As elective procedures return to pre-COVID volumes, there is an increasing demand for outpatient post-surgical rehabilitation.
- Under recent policy changes, access to physical therapy was massively extended. Additionally, physical therapy cannot be automated.
- A PT moves with a patient in three-dimensional space, processes pain signals not recorded on a chart, and modifies technique mid-session based on continuous feedback.
- That is a behaviour which AI cannot clone in the clinical environment.
Now we’ve got to see the inverse. Project Manager fell -82%. Business Analyst fell -65%. Account Manager fell -69%. These are positions for which AI-assisted tools, from Asana Intelligence to Salesforce Einstein, have meaningfully reduced the hours of work required per deliverable. This compression does not always remove the role from existence, but it reduces how many people a team needs to hire to fill in the function. Recruiters can tell that their search activity has been curtailed.
SignalHire’s recruiting intelligence platform enables sourcing for both the surging healthcare roles and the specialized technical positions that are replacing generalist ones.
United Kingdom: Specialist Over Generalist
The UK data surfaces a distinction that the global aggregate obscures. Software Engineer fell -75%. But Java Developer rose +3,257%. QA and Software Test Engineer rose +567%.
Those numbers sound conflicting at first until you view them through the generalist/specialist lens. Since the traditional “Software Engineer” title encapsulates so many activities, a lot of them are presently subsumed by GitHub Copilot and various AI code review as well as testing frameworks. Hiring managers in the UK looking for Java Developer or QA/SDET talent are seeking a very specific technical skillset and not just someone with broad, general-purpose coding skills. Consequently, the accuracy has improved and also the search volume for generalists has declined.
Quantitative Finance Specialist rose +2,688%. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that 39% of CMOs planned to reduce labor costs including agency headcount, which maps directly to the UK data: Paid Media and Advertising Specialist fell -74% year over year. Consumer behavior has shifted dramatically and AI tools are replacing many of the creative and paid distribution functions that agencies used to provide. The mathematical expertise and accountability functions provided by the regulatory competencies are not.
Legal Professional rose +66%. About Direct Care Worker: Search volume was stable in both time spans. Human judgement in regulated contexts can not be automated. It is being competed for.
Canada: The Collapse of Digital Marketing
Canada produces the singular largest decline in the whole dataset Digital Marketing Specialist: -95% (from 894 recruiter searches in early 2025 to 48 in the same time period of 2026). Digital Marketing Director fell -14%. This pattern is similar throughout all types of digital marketing in the Canadian data.
The hypothesis is simple. Fortunately, AI content generation tools have significantly decreased the manpower needed for creating, testing and distributing digital marketing content. A team that relied on six specialists to run content, paid search, email and analytics hours can now be run with fewer humans augmented with artificial intelligence. The reduction in these roles’ share of recruiter demand within Canada has also outpaced that of any other country in the dataset.
Instead what you saw was: Automotive Technician (+182%), Claims Adjuster → +6,600% (from a very small base), Claims Representative → +289%, Heavy Truck Driver → +600%. Hiring in trades and insurance has increased, while hiring in marketing has decreased. Demand for roles which require a physical presence, as well as regulatory judgment, are built from infrastructure investment cycles, an aging vehicle fleet and a challenging insurance claims environment.
Application Architect grew +7,150% as well from a small base which may suggest (Canadian) companies are investing in technical architecture while reducing operational marketing headcount. AI will not be able to forget this as humans still design and build architectures in AI enabled systems.
Australia: Accounting and Talent Acquisition
Australia’s top ten is dominated by accounting roles. Middle and Senior Accountants rose +118%. Junior and Graduate Accountants rose +1,162%. Talent Acquisition Director rose from a single search in 2025 to 90 searches in 2026.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates 338,362 accountants will be needed by 2026, meaning it is almost 10,000 out of the press each year when there is nothing like fresh supply. Data from Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand reveals that enrolments in the Accounting Professional Year program declined from 7122 in 2018 to about 340 by 2024. This growing shortage, in the eyes of SignalHire recruit search data has many reasons and one of them is that pipeline collapse. Australia is not ruminating on a future in which there is an enduring shortage of accountants. They are looking in a current one.
The Talent Acquisition Director spike deserves its own discussion. This dependency on external agencies is waning as organizations are now building internal sourcing capability. Hays’s 2026 Australia Jobs Report which highlights that the skills shortage isn’t limited to one sector but affects a wide range of sectors between energy and financial services saw an increase in headcount. The Talent Acquisition Director sits at the intersection of that shortage and sourcing specialized professionals directly.
SignalHire’s database covers 850M+ verified profiles with filter capability by title, company, location, and industry, making it suited for the precise sourcing that Australian hiring teams are running for accounting and finance roles.
India: Administration Disappears, Sustainability Rises
Maximum Automation signal in Data – India has the loudest Incoming Noise of AI across entire dataset. Administration Specialist fell -88%. Administration Manager fell -75%. Account Manager fell -80%. These three roles collectively account for a significant part of the white-collar end of the administrative function that India’s service economy created over the last 20 years.
Goldman Sachs research updated until 2025, clerical and administrative work would rank amongst the highest-exposed categories for AI automation globally, as two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to a variety of AI tasks. Administrative and back-office roles are heavily concentrated in India, so it’s one of the first markets to experience that exposure by trickling through recruiter behavior.
What took their place in the top ten ES & Sustainability Professional(+71%), Area Sales Manager (+241%), Assistant Manager(+40%). The advance in sustainability fits with India’s wielding of corporate governance. Certain Indian firms must report on ESG performance; people with expertise navigating that labyrinth are rare.
Despite the -18% drop in 2025, AI Engineer and Developer stands firm as one of the top ten occupations in India. A drop from a high base indicates that the initial hiring boom in AI has normalized, not collapsed. Institutions that were active in recruiting AI engineers in 2025 have met their short term needs. The demand is still there, just at a more gradual pace.
What This Means for Hiring Teams
These are often based on the information from recruiter searches before a job is formally posted. The gap also means SignalHire users have a structural edge, they can find out where talent competition is racing ahead of appearing on public viewing channels.
The dataset has the following specific practical implication. Search is fierce right now for healthcare hiring (particularly physical and occupational therapy) in the US. The demand for professionals in quantitative finance and legal roles is increasing fast but their supply in the UK comes from a small pool. The pipeline data suggests that the structural mismatch in Australian accounting is not going to go anywhere fast. Canadian trade roles are going quickly.
For teams sourcing in these categories, the SignalHire browser extension enables direct contact lookup on LinkedIn and any professional website without switching tools, and the sales and outreach capability supports multi-touch candidate engagement sequences for hard-to-reach passive candidates in tight markets.
The Market Is Not Contracting. It Is Sorting.
The case against a narrative of collapse does not rely on conjecture. It tells a story of redistribution and that the pace of that redistribution is greater than most official forecasts have picked up on.
Increased recruiter attention is seen in roles that are either going to require a physical presence, expertise in clinical medicine, or nuanced human judgement. Jobs where the crux of the output overlaps with what A.I. tools do today are in decline. By country, by role and how automatable a particular function is as per AI.
As indicated in the results on SignalHire research, gain can be already seen in the search behavior of hiring managers who do not wait for projections to come true. They are sourcing for the roles that now exist in the restructured market. The answer to what people will be hiring in 2026 was NOT computer programmers, which was surprising to say the least, along with natural language processing and quantitative finance specialists alongside physical therapists, accountants, and automotive technicians. The data says they are.
Methodology note:
SignalHire data shows recruiter searches on the platform in Jan-Apl 2025 and Jan-Apl 2026 across five countries US, UK, Canada, Australia & India. The percentage represents a year-on-year change in search volume per country dataset per role. Roles with very low 2025 base volumes (<5 searches) should be treated directionally rather than as accurate growth rates.
