Hire Calling

10 Trends Redefining Jobs, Pay, and Hiring in 2026

• Pete Newsome • Episode 93

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What will the labor market actually look like in 2026? We break down 10 trends reshaping jobs, pay, and hiring. From agentic AI running multi-step workflows to hybrid work settling in as the default, we show what’s changing, what’s sticking, and where the real career upside is.

AI is no longer just a tool. It’s starting to act like a teammate, connecting tasks into outcomes across recruiting, operations, and customer work. That shift comes with trade-offs: fewer entry-level white-collar roles, greater leverage for skilled trades, and quieter, ongoing headcount trims rather than splashy layoffs. Pay stabilizes as transparency grows, making negotiations clearer and expectations more realistic. The advantage moves to human skills, like judgment, empathy, and influence, because execution is easier to automate than trust.

We also explain why hybrid work keeps winning, how to use in-person time strategically, and what “slow-motion RTO” means for mentorship and visibility. We unpack skills-first hiring as degrees lose ground to certificates and proof of work, plus how automation is speeding up recruiting while raising the bar on fairness. You’ll hear what’s driving the “great stay,” and how to create optionality through visible wins and cross-functional impact. We close with visa shifts and the growing push to govern AI in hiring, with practical takeaways for leaders.

The takeaway is simple: pair AI fluency with power skills, prioritize visibility, and lead with proof over credentials. If this sparked a new way of thinking about 2026, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and tell us which trend you’re betting on.

Additional Resources:
1. Recruiting Trends for 2026: https://www.4cornerresources.com/blog/recruiting-trends-for-the-new-year/
2. Hiring and Salary Guide: https://www.4cornerresources.com/hiring-salary-guide/
3. Q4 2025 AI Perception and Threat in the Workplace Survey: https://www.4cornerresources.com/workplace-ai-perception-and-threat-survey-results/
4. Q4 2025 Employee Mindset Survey: https://www.4cornerresources.com/surveys/q4-2025-employee-mindset/

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🧠 WANT TO LEARN MORE? Be sure to subscribe and check out 4 Corner Resources at https://www.4cornerresources.com/

👋 FOLLOW PETE NEWSOME ONLINE:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenewsome/
Blog Articles: https://www.4cornerresources.com/blog

Pete Newsome:

You're listening to the Higher Calling podcast. If you've been wondering what the workplace is going to look like in 2026, well, you're not alone, but Peter and I are here to give you answers that we believe will shape the workplace in the year ahead. So if you spend the next few minutes with us, we're going to share 10 trends we think are really going to define what will impact all of us. So, Peter, are you ready to get into this?

Peter Porebski:

Absolutely. Let's jump into these. Let's do it. So, number one trend is going to be the rise of agentic AI. Um, if you haven't heard that term before, that is just an AI agent that is completing multiple tasks in combination to form complex sequences. It's no longer just Chat GPT writing rewriting your resume. It's rewriting your resume, improving upon it, maybe even submitting your resume. All of these things, that's what makes an AI agent.

Pete Newsome:

This is something that is really going to become prevalent across so many organizations in the year ahead. And if you think about it, it's really AI starting to act like a human worker, or in some cases, doing the work of multiple humans. Now, that's a little unsettling to a significant degree, but it's also really exciting for those who are willing to lean into it. So our advice there for sure is to embrace it, but just be aware that if you're an employee, odds are your organization is adopting AI in some form or fashion right now. Because we know the vast majority of them are, everyone's going to take a different approach. They'll do it at a different pace. But be aware of what's happening and make sure that you're able to leverage it as much as possible.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, the capabilities of these tools are just increasing exponentially. So whereas in the past, people might have thought of, oh yeah, we we use automation or we use AI, the things that it's being able to do are spanning now multiple scopes, multiple, you know, they might might work across multiple projects, disciplines, what have you. Um, it's it's just going to become more and more of a thing in your in the workplace in the coming year.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, and as a as a natural result, we're going to see that start to influence staffing decisions. So that is a big part of this, too. It's the part we don't necessarily like, that there's potential job displacement, but again, it's going to create significant opportunities as well. So be aware, follow the trends, see what's going on with it, and make sure you're in the loop. And then take advantage of uh using AI wherever you can. Peter, the net the next trend is one that I have been thinking of as a blue-collar renaissance and white-collar recession.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, the that's the widening gap between skilled trades and uh the shrinking number of early career entry-level corporate roles, the the entry-level white-collar roles.

Pete Newsome:

And we don't know for sure, but it seems logical that AI is impacting those early level roles, right? These are often repetitive tasks that are most easily replaceable by AI. So you combine that with a job market that hasn't exactly been hot. And it's tough for entry-level uh people right now. And we are seeing more opportunities in skilled trades. The supply and demand is certainly favoring employees in that space, favoring the workers. And that's not really what's going on with white-collar positions right now, certainly not at the entry level.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, this is uh it's it's a it's a tough spot to be in if you're, you know, maybe maybe mid-career. So if you are somebody who is thinking about, you know, restarting your career, making a pivot, this is something to be aware of. Uh, it's just that, like like Pete said, AI is is taking away some of the the simpler tasks. Uh, and as it learns more and more complex, that's gonna only increase. And who does the simpler tasks in a in a job? It's the entry-level people. That those are the people that are generally getting the the easier quote unquote um jobs. So that's gonna be something that's gonna continue to grow and affect uh the workforce in 2026.

Pete Newsome:

And recent studies have shown that parents and students, those who would traditionally go to college by default, are now reconsidering their options there. So big shifts happening in the work uh place right now and in the workforce as a whole. So we see that not only continue uh being a very big trend in 2026, but for many years to come beyond that.

Peter Porebski:

So the third trend that we are anticipating in the coming year is that workforce adjustments are gonna become more ongoing rather than dramatic. And what that means is that there's not gonna be as many large-scale layoffs by companies. It's it's gonna be more constant, smaller uh recalibrations of workforce.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, because those small-scale reductions not only help companies manage headcount, but they're able to do so without triggering legal requirements or negative headlines. So, in some cases, uh in many cases, if companies lay off a certain number of people, they're legally required to publicize it. Well, companies don't want to do that. They want to operate under the radar because those negative headlines will certainly follow. Nobody likes bad press. And so these rolling layoffs are a way that companies can avoid that and they're doing it consciously.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, uh we just recently did a survey, and over a half of employee or employees expressed anxiety about the long-term future of their role. And that's that's just seems to be kind of the uh the norm in the workplace, you know, unfortunately. Right now, companies don't want to be in the news for 5,000 people losing their jobs, but 50 here, 100 here, that's doable. And that's what we're gonna see more of a lot, a lot more of those small-scale um, I won't even call them late, we'll call them recalibrations, I guess.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, and what we hope is that we see employers be as open as they can about communicating what's happening because uh an anxious workforce is not a productive workforce. We know that. And so if your employees are wondering what's gonna happen next because they feel like there's always something bad happening around the corner, that's not that's gonna not gonna make for a great situation internally. So hopefully companies will start to communicate that as best they can to their team and not make them looking, uh keep them looking over their shoulders all the time.

Peter Porebski:

So so trend four is a little bit of a positive one. Uh we are seeing a leveling of compensation and rapid pay expansion of pay transparency with everything being available online. It's a lot easier to see what you should be making and what your coworkers are making at a company and what the benefits are. So all of that is going to continue into the next year.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, and so we saw everyone who remembers 2022, which seems in some ways like a lifetime ago, um, remembers the there was a lot of salary increases. The market was going crazy for a while, uh, and very much an employees market, but the pendulum has shifted. I think everyone knows that by now. We expect that to persist throughout 2026 and expect a roughly three to three and a half percent salary increases as a as a whole. So maybe not what employees were used to a couple of years ago, but that has become uh the the new normal, if you will.

Peter Porebski:

Yep. Uh the the good news, if you want to look at it that way, that I've been talking to candidates is that you can be you you should be able to express your expectations for a new job up front. Negotiations are gonna be a lot more transparent. It takes a lot of the anxiety out of understanding like, am I asking too much? Am I asking too little? Like you should know generally the range of a lot of these roles that you're going into, and you should know what the clear expectations are for you to get a raise, to move to that next role, what your coworkers are making. All of that is a lot easier to find uh with the advent of online reviews and websites like Glassdoor.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, and what we also see is a lot of uh states putting forth new laws, new rules that are forcing, for lack of a better way to put it, employers to be more transparent. And so that's gonna cause some bumps and bruises along the way. A little disruption once companies have to communicate things that uh they may have kept somewhat private, discreet in the past, because employees are going to be bothered if they find out that there's big compensation imbalances. But the long-term benefit, I think, will be there, where that's something that companies have always dealt with. Employees are going to talk anyway. So you may as well be transparent, communicate openly, and you don't have to worry about well, then as an employer, you don't have to worry about what's gonna come next and looking over your shoulder uh to know uh to wonder which which you know issue you're going to have to deal with at any minute with an upset employee. So communicate openly, don't operate in the dark. Everyone will ultimately be uh be better off.

Peter Porebski:

Absolutely. You said it. Uh employees are gonna talk, so it just brings it all out in the open. Trend five centers on human-centric skills becoming the real differentiator in the workplace as hiring continues and as AI continues to grow.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing AI start to commoditize technical execution in many respects. So the value of those human skills is definitely starting to peak. And we're talking about things like empathy, complex negotiation, ethical judgment, the things that you can't rely on, at least not yet, hopefully not anytime soon. You can't rely on AI to replicate.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, the term that I use when I talk to people is contextual judgment. And that's the ability to interpret nuance tone, ambiguity, soft skills. That that's what matters. Um, AI, right now, uh that's the area that it falls short in, is when you give it a feeling or you give it, you know, understand why these are different, but I can't, you know, completely articulate it. And that's where humans are going to shine is being able to bridge that gap uh between the you use an AI for an automated technical tool, and then you are the person who interprets it and relates it to another tool.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, and you said the phrase soft skills, and those are now almost power skills in the workplace because the people who are best at the things AI can't do are are going to rise to the top and and really differentiate themselves. So interesting shifts we're we're seeing there for sure.

Peter Porebski:

Absolutely. This is uh a little bit off topic of this up here, but uh I've always told candidates that any hiring manager I've talked to has always said I can teach people technical skills. I can't teach people to be easy to get along with or to be have good critical thinking or good judgment skills. So those are the things that really are going to, especially when it's really easy to get technical things done with the rise of AI, those are gonna be the things that set you apart.

Pete Newsome:

I don't I don't think that's off topic at all. I think that is a great thing to point out because to your point, what was always important now now may be the only thing that that you know, if you strip away all the things AI can do, it's really all we have left, are those soft skills. So that's a great point.

Peter Porebski:

So trend six is the is the stabilization of hybrid work. There's an undeniable connection between uh your in-person presence and your career progression. That's that is established by many, many studies. Hybrid is now gonna be the uh the company operating standard. Uh, it's not gonna be treated as a temporary solution. So proximity does still matter. It's not gonna be all the way returned to office and it's not gonna be all the way high uh remote either. There's gonna be, I feel like, a happy medium, and that's what we're seeing uh in 2026.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, it's it's an interesting dilemma because employers have conceded, even the ones that wanted people to go back to the office on an extreme basis, some still do that. But the hybrid wars, for all intents and purposes, are over, right? Hybrids here to stay. But just because you have the option to work remotely as an employee doesn't mean you should. And as you said, all the data that's coming out makes it very clear that out of sight, out of mind is something that is going to impact your ability to be promoted at work. And it just makes sense when you think about it, right? We gravitate towards those we see, who we interact with, we get to know on a regular basis uh or on a personal basis. And when you remove that away and you're only getting to see someone over over Zoom, when you compare that to the person who's in the office, well, it just makes sense that they're going to naturally have better opportunities. It's probably not intentional, not conscious, but it is a real thing. And the data absolutely backs that up.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, yeah. People, when you're in an when you're in office, even if you're not trying to be seen, you are being seen. You're getting to know people. So if you're working remote, you have to make a conscious decision to be participating, to be seen, to get these mentorship opportunities. So it's particularly important for people uh newer in their career who are trying to get to know you know their coworkers or to get a mentor. So those things are are really important, and I tell that to anybody I meet.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, and there's and there's a phrase that's come out over the past out of three, four, six months about this. I should have said six, seven, uh, that's called slow-mo RTO, where you know, it's it's happening gradually, almost naturally in a way, because we're starting to see the downsides of working remotely. And also I think that even um younger workers without the limitations of of maybe being passed over for things at work are just feeling isolated. And it's not in realizing it's even though on paper it sounds great to work remotely, and in many ways it is, don't get me wrong, but there's also downside. It is lonely. You don't have the ability to build relationships. So we're seeing uh an interesting change. And I expect throughout the year we're going to see more employees choosing to go back in the office, even if they're not forced to.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, you uh you said it's funny. We we, I mean, I'm working remote right now, so I I'm not knocking remote work, but there are definite downsides, and you have to make conscious choices to kind of mitigate them. So if you're not used to having that level of control, it's probably just easier or better for your career to choose a role where you're at least part-time getting face-to-face uh meetings with people. Absolutely. So, trend seven is the ongoing uh decre decline of degree requirements. And this is something we've seen in the past. So this is just going to continue into the future. Uh, more employers are prioritizing skills and your demonstrated capability over a formal academic path.

Pete Newsome:

Historically, certainly in your career, mine, we have seen a certain value placed on a bachelor's degree, what I often refer to as a generic bachelor's degree, one that doesn't necessarily qualify you to do anything specifically in the professional space. So, humanities, liberal arts. I had a degree in political science. I was not qualified to be a political scientist when I graduated from college. That's not a path I took anyway, but it was a certain line that was drawn where you would hit that ceiling, the paper ceiling, if you did not have a degree. Well, now companies are rethinking that entirely, and we're seeing a huge reset going on, which I am personally a fan of because if the we we know education is expensive, we know college isn't for everyone. And so this shift is one that I know is going to upset a lot of people, and many people are struggling with it because they put so much value on that diploma. But Peter, it's it's just not what it used to be. There's there's no better way to phrase it.

Peter Porebski:

Uh yeah, it's uh to quote uh the incredible syndrome when everyone's special, no one will be. So if everybody has a bachelor's degree, it doesn't really mean the same thing that it used to, where only a percentage of the population and it meant a certain thing. And this is not to say obviously there are technical degrees that if you you go to nursing school, you're you're gonna be a nurse. I'm talking about more general business or um or or general you know liberal arts. Um, a lot of jobs will say they used to say needs a degree in X field, and now it's become kind of needs a degree in X field or related experience. And now it's going even beyond that to just having a degree, and we're gonna see it continue on to like having a degree or equivalent knowledge and experience.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, we are not suggesting that someone is qualified to uh perform surgery because they want to or stayed at a holiday in the night before, right? We're there's we're we're talking about jobs that really uh have no logical reason to have a hard and fast requirement to have a degree. It's really been a comfort thing as much as anything else. And what we're seeing instead is, like you said, hiring for skills. Can you do the job? Also hiring for experience, right? Have you done it in the past? Even if you don't have that degree, we're seeing a big shift to employers saying we value that experience more than anything else. And also, there's boot camps, there's certificate programs that are really becoming popular and meaningful, where the data that we've seen shows that companies value certificates almost to the same degree that they value a college degree.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, yeah, it's it's all about getting your foot in the door at the end of the day. And those boot camps, those certificates in a lot of cases, that's what they help you do. And once you've got that first job where you can showcase what skills you've worked, you know, on your resume, that matters more than education anyway. So uh that's that's only gonna continue in the in the next year. So the eighth trend is gonna be the heavy automation of the early stage recruiting. So with application volume, it's at record highs right now. Automation now handles resume parsing, um, screening candidates, scheduling, status updates, all of that is gonna become hugely ingrained in the recruiting process.

Pete Newsome:

And this is such a uh a great area for us to talk about because of course it's our business, staffing and recruiting. And the impact of AI is not only going to be profound, but it's going to be so beneficial for everyone involved in the process. So candidates on the surface may hear an AI recruiter, that sounds very impersonal, but not when you compare it to how the market is operating today. The one-click apply process has allowed candidates to, with no thought, no effort, apply to hundreds of jobs in a very short time frame. Well, that means recruiters are getting hundreds of jobs in some cases or applications, in some cases thousands for a single job opening. And just as a matter of practicality, they can't get to all those resumes. They can't give personal responses, they can't give personal attention, they can't review them thoroughly, and it just creates a very inefficient recruiting process. So with that said being the case, apply AI. They can immediately screen resumes, respond to candidates. That don't appear qualified, letting them know that and letting them know why and giving them an opportunity to respond. I mean, just that alone is worth its weight in gold in the in the staffing or in the recruiting process. But it goes way well beyond that. It allows the AI to do a live interview where the candidate can ask questions. Again, not waiting for a human recruiter to be available, but to have that happen right now. And what we're seeing is AI that does a very, very good job of assessing candidate quality through those conversations and then passing them on to a human recruiter. So basically allowing the candidates to get faster responses, better responses, more thorough responses, and allow, of course, the recruiting process to operate at a level of efficiency that was never possible before.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, I think uh in the past, maybe people thought of, oh, well, the the the AI is or the automation is just screening my resume. Uh here's the way I tell everyone to look at it. You it might sound really great on paper to have only a human ever look at your resume, but on average, hiring managers and recruiters are looking at your resume less than five seconds if they've got hundreds of applications. So are they gonna, and that's assuming that your resume is perfectly formatted, which we know that is not the case with most, at least with these AI tools, the capabilities I've seen that they can do, they are screening your entire resume. They are look, it's form agnostic, they can read everything. It's actually going through it and understanding if it matches the job skills. Then it's passing that on to the recruiter to review. So the recruiter can actually do a deep dive into it and talk to the people that are qualified for the role. So it may seem a little counterintuitive, but from what I've seen, this has actually increased candidate uh satisfaction in the job process.

Pete Newsome:

And as if you can't tell, this is one we're pretty excited about ourselves because we know how much it's going to improve our industry. And yeah, Peter, when you think about it, you have to assume that there's AI, you know, there's the same level of AI uh tools and services that we're seeing for our industry being applied everywhere. It's just really um exciting to think about. And I am convinced that 2026 is going to be a year where we see a huge step ahead, just with AI as a whole, but specifically and um in the recruiting process.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, there's gonna be some some really cool stuff coming in the next year. And it's gonna be interesting to see just how, I mean, nobody could have predicted when uh when ChatGPT came out, like how much it would grow just in one year. So this time next year, uh, I expect that we'll have some some interesting takes on everything. Absolutely. So the uh the ninth trend, trend nine, is a reduced mobility across the workforce. Um, employees are staying in their current roles longer. Uh, it's creating more stability, but because employees aren't moving on, there's fewer openings.

Pete Newsome:

There are fewer openings driven by a number of things happening right now. The tariffs have made a lot of employers cautious, slow to hire. The economy as a whole, the supply and demand in the job market right now is unfavorable for many professions. There's some exceptions, healthcare being the biggest one that's out there right now. So this is not universal, but for the most part, in the white-collar space specifically, there is more supply than demand. And it for younger uh workers as much as anything else. And so we see workers not moving, not creating opportunities for others to open up more people competing for fewer jobs, all the above. So that's where the the great stay has become a phrase, also referred to as job hugging. It all kind of means the same thing, is that workers they're staying, not necessarily because they want to, but because their options are limited right now.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, there's there's nothing really be to be done about this, you know, on the worker side. So it's just really something to be aware of going into the new year. Uh Monster Research uh did a study and showed that uh three out of four employees expected to stay in their role for the next at least two years. So that's it's really a prevalent uh sentiment across the entire workforce right now.

Pete Newsome:

We're cut we're coming down to the end here, right?

Peter Porebski:

We're we're down at the end. So trend 10 is the modernization of compliance, and that's visa sponsorship costs, pay documentation, oversight of automated decisions, all of that, that all of these things that affect hiring are gonna affect hiring in a more direct way in 2026.

Pete Newsome:

Yeah, the V the visa overhaul, the H1B visa overhaul has certainly grabbed some headlines over the past few months. Hey, there's a lot of people really happy about that. There's a lot of companies that are frustrated uh by what's happening, but it's here to stay, and it's something that um that everyone's going to deal with. And listen, if I I'm I that there's been a lot of abuse to the H1B system, we know that, but it has a lot of merit. There's a there's a great reason it exists, that the US should have a uh a path to bring in the most talented workers that are available. And so I see this shift as really helping the H1B visa program get back to what it was intended to be in the first place. And that will that will benefit uh Americans as a whole, no doubt about it. And but it's a but it's a big shift, Peter. It's it's and it's and it's happening. I think uh it took a lot of people by surprise the way it happened so quickly.

Peter Porebski:

Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of changes, just you know, obviously you mentioned Visa, but there's uh there's laws and regulations that are coming down that are going to affect how AI is used in the decision-making process. All of these things are gonna be they're gonna be uh changing a lot over the next year, we'll say. Uh so that's gonna be something to really pay attention to, particularly for hiring managers that are that are using these tools.

Pete Newsome:

And and that's a fight that we'll see play out in the months ahead. I don't know that I want to try to make a crystal ball prediction on how that's going to work. You never know what the courts are going to decide, but states are looking to put a lot of AI-based laws in place, as you referred to. Uh I now I personally think they're going to have a nearly impossible time tracking that, keeping up. AI is evolving much, much faster than I think any state government can track. But put that aside, what we have happening at the same time, and is the time we're recording this, which is the middle of December, uh, President Trump just signed an executive order basically saying that states aren't allowed to make too many AI specifications, uh put too many AI speci laws in place. Uh he'd rather have, or maybe not at all, uh he'd rather AI, he wants AI to really be regulated at the highest possible level so it's not happening locally. It's a fight, it's a mess. We don't know how that's gonna work out, but we do know that's going to be a trend that it will we'll all be trying to follow and keep up with in the workplace in 2026.

Peter Porebski:

So I think that is uh that's all 10 of our trends. Can we cover them all?

Pete Newsome:

I think we did. I think we did. And this is going to be such an interesting year. Uh the just the last few months, what we've seen with the changes, it's hard not to get excited about AI. That's the one that I'm most excited uh about by a very wide margin, Peter. What do you think? Do you think do you think I expect it to be uh uh make a bigger impact than it actually will?

Peter Porebski:

No, I mean from from what I've seen and just the way that these you know the tools and the companies are evolving. I it's it's honestly we have these as trends for 2026, but these trends are gonna be like over the next six months we're gonna be seeing things. So it's it's gonna be a wild ride for sure. The future is now. Absolutely.

Pete Newsome:

All right. Well, with that, I think we can say goodbye. And thanks for hanging with us this long. If you've been here, we'll review this 12 months from now, see how we did. I like our chances. I think, I think, I think uh I feel pretty confident that we're on the right.

Peter Porebski:

I think uh I think we're doing pretty good there. So all right.

Pete Newsome:

Well, thanks for listening. Have a great year.

Peter Porebski:

Thanks.