In 2024 we captured over a million interviews on Metaview, across geographies, departments, and company stages.
To find the patterns underneath the headlines, we built Metaview Trends. It lets anyone search a keyword or phrase and see how it moved through interview conversations across the year.
Five trends pulled away from the rest.
AI officially became mainstream
Mentions of AI rose roughly 35% across interviews from the start of the year to peak in late 2024. The biggest jumps were in Engineering, Product, and GTM functions, but the trend held in every department we measured.
The more interesting signal sat underneath. From March onward, candidates started mentioning AI more frequently than interviewers did. They were proactively bringing up AI fluency without being asked.
The same dynamic showed up in tooling discussions. Python overtook JavaScript as the most-discussed language by a 2x margin, driven by an influx of new contributors from outside traditional software backgrounds.
Discussion of "AI agents" overtook "AI assistants" mid-year, with the highest frequency in Engineering, Product, and GTM interviews. The framing shift mattered. Candidates and interviewers stopped talking about AI as a tool you query and started talking about it as a teammate that runs.
The full picture lands in our AI-enabled recruiter survey, where 93% of recruiters said AI skills are now necessary for the job.
The workplace flexibility debate raged on
Workplace norms remained one of the most-discussed topics throughout the year. Mentions of "return to office" rose steadily from January and peaked in October, lining up with the high-profile RTO announcements from Amazon, Alphabet, and others.
Mentions of "remote work" stayed higher than "hybrid work" all year. From May onward, candidates began mentioning remote work more often than interviewers did. The signal: candidates wanted flexible work clarified up front, not negotiated at offer stage.
Both sides of the table know flexibility is now a deal-breaker. The question isn't whether to discuss it. The question is which side raises it first.
The culture conversation shifted
2024 was a reckoning year for workplace culture. SHRM announced it would remove "equity" from its DEI framing. Boeing and Ford disbanded DEI departments. The debate around merit versus diversity dominated trade press.
The interview corpus tracked the shift directly. Mentions of DEI peaked in January and dropped to their lowest point in May. By December, DEI was mentioned about 30% less often than at the start of the year.
DEI was mentioned most often by candidates, not by interviewers. People-related interviews carried the highest mention rates; Engineering and Product carried the lowest.
At the same time, mentions of "company culture" peaked in June and ended the year more than 40% higher than they started. The conversation didn't go away. The vocabulary changed.
The macro mood started looking up
The first half of 2024 carried over the macro anxiety of the prior two years. Layoff announcements, hiring freezes, and recession headlines were still everywhere through Q1.
By the back half of the year, the mood shifted. The US economy added 227,000 jobs in November. Total job postings returned to pre-pandemic norms in the US, UK, and Canada.
The interview corpus reflected the change. Mentions of "recession" peaked at the start of 2024 and dropped to their lowest point in the last months of the year. November mentions were more than 35% lower than January.
Mentions of "layoff" followed the same arc. We've covered the broader pattern of macro topics in interviews and how to address them in interviewing well in a market downturn.
Adaptability emerged as the key skill
LinkedIn called adaptability the top in-demand skill of 2024. The interview corpus said the same thing.
Mentions of "adaptability" rose steadily across the year. Mentions of "resilience" and "problem-solving" climbed alongside it. The pattern held across every department we measured, from Engineering to GTM to People.
The framing shifted with the trend. Hiring managers stopped asking only about specific stack experience and started asking about how candidates handled change in their last role.
As AI continues to redraw the boundaries of what every job looks like, "the ability to keep learning" outweighed "the specific things you already know."
How this data is captured
Every chart in this post comes from Metaview Trends, which aggregates anonymized data from interview conversation transcripts on Metaview Notetaker.
Notetaker records and transcribes the interview, then labels what's inside it. Question type, keyword mentions, who said what, candidate speaking time. Trends rolls those labels into popularity scores over time.
The popularity score scales mentions from 0 to 100. 100 marks peak popularity for that keyword in the period. 50 reflects half the interest. 0 indicates insufficient data to chart.
What this means for 2026
The trends in this post were the leading edge of what became the dominant story of 2025 and 2026: AI as infrastructure inside hiring, not just a tool sitting next to it.
The 2026 AI & Hiring Alignment Report picks up where this analysis left off. Across 505 recruiting leaders and hiring managers, 85% of companies exceeding their hiring goals now use AI in hiring, and teams with high alignment are 3x more likely to hit their numbers.
The skill conversations in 2024 interviews predicted that gap. The companies that took adaptability and AI fluency seriously in their 2024 interview loops are the ones running ahead in 2026.
For the patterns under the patterns, look at the three most common mistakes new interviewers make. They explain why some teams capture this signal cleanly and others miss it.
Frequently asked
What were the top recruiting trends in 2024?
Five trends pulled away from the rest in the Metaview corpus of 1M+ interviews. AI became table stakes (mentions up 35%, candidates leading those conversations from March). The workplace-flexibility debate raged on (RTO peaked in October, remote stayed higher than hybrid). The culture conversation shifted (DEI mentions down 30%, "company culture" up 40%). The macro mood lifted (recession mentions down 35% by year-end). And adaptability emerged as the most-mentioned skill across every department.
How is AI changing job interviews?
Two ways. First, candidates are bringing up their AI fluency without being prompted, especially from March 2024 onward. Second, the questions interviewers are asking have shifted from "do you have experience with X stack" to "how have you adapted to changes in your role." AI fluency is now a baseline expectation across functions, not just engineering. The full breakdown is in our AI-enabled recruiter survey.
Why is adaptability such a sought-after skill?
Because the half-life of specific technical skills keeps shrinking. The framework, the tool, the language a team uses today may not be the one they use in eighteen months. Hiring managers have started to interview for the capacity to keep learning, not just the specific things a candidate already knows. The Metaview corpus shows mentions of adaptability, resilience, and problem-solving all rising steadily across 2024.
What topics dominate interview conversations now?
As of late 2024, the most-mentioned topics in the Metaview corpus were AI skills (across every department), workplace flexibility (remote, hybrid, RTO), company culture, and adaptability. The 2026 AI & Hiring Alignment Report shows the conversation has since shifted toward AI as infrastructure, with 85% of companies exceeding their hiring goals now using AI in the hiring process itself.
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