The future of recruiting is arriving faster than most teams are prepared for. And particularly as AI becomes an everyday instrument, there are both real risks and major advantages to come.
In a special episode of 10x Recruiting, Nolan Church and Siadhal Magos shared their boldest predictions for what 2026 will look like across recruiting, AI, and the broader talent market.
From $100 million non-technical roles, to the rise of entirely new job titles like “agent manager,” the conversation explored how foundational shifts in technology will ripple outward into hiring practices, compensation, social dynamics, and even public backlash.
Here are ten bold predictions about the shape of recruiting and tech hiring over the next two years.
10 predictions on the future of recruiting, tech, & AI
1. An exodus of VC talent partners
The AI industry is utterly exploding, with growth and huge valuations coming thick and fast. Siadhal says this will pull talent partners away from VC firms to get hands-on in building the companies of the future.
“I think there’s some incredible talent in VC platform teams,” Siadhal says. “A lot of them are going to figure out how to get back in the game and join AI companies as operators.”
And the motivation isn’t purely financial (though that’s part of it). Siadhal says we’re living through a once-in-a-generation shift in how work gets done. “This is the gold rush. How can you not want to be in the most exciting thing in the world?”
For Nolan, whether recruiting leaders actually leave firms or not, “the era of VC talent partners just giving advice is over,” he says. “They need to actually be doing the work.”
Siadhal concludes that “your advice is not going to be valuable in ten years time unless you are part of figuring AI out. There'll be a lot of people who decide they need to get in now.”
2. AI becomes the default first screen
One of Nolan’s strongest predictions is that AI will become the default first interaction candidates have with companies—and that candidates will actually prefer it.
“AI becomes the de facto first screen for inbound, and candidates will love it.” The resume-only model no longer makes sense for companies with strong brands.
And in many cases, neither do job fairs. “Why would you go to campus and waste your resources that way? Instead, we can just share a link that takes you to a one-way AI-based interview. In five minutes, we can assess sales folks’ ability to communicate, or how well they get their point across.”
The benefits for companies are obvious. But why is it actually a win for candidates, too? "It's going to dramatically reduce the time spent from recruiting and interview teams and make it a better candidate experience.
“For new grads specifically, who are already more AI native, they're going to be used to experimentation. And they know that their application isn't just going into a black box. It's actually going to get reviewed."
AI screening will feel more collaborative and transparent—especially for AI-native candidates entering the workforce. Over time, this normalizes AI’s role throughout the hiring process, not just at the top of the funnel.
3. 90% of sourcing gets automated in 2026
There will always be a hands-on role for human recruiters. But the days of manual candidate search will soon be over. Sourcing is heading for near-total automation.
“90% of sourcing will be automated by the end of 2026,” Nolan says, reflecting on how much time recruiters historically spent just finding candidates. “I used to spend twenty to forty percent of my week, literally just looking for the right candidate.”
Within the next 12 months, Nolan sees recruiters and sourcers dedicating their full attention to edge cases and last mile-type tasks, and not to scrolling job boards.
It’s essentially the perfect outcome for AI in hiring: recruiters spending time on higher-leverage work, using their judgment, and building relationships through richer candidate experiences.
4. Your ATS becomes almost invisible
Applicant tracking systems are fundamental for talent teams. They’re not going away, but the active time spent moving candidates through funnel stages and updating profiles will. And so, for the most efficient teams, Siadhal says the ATS will be largely out of sight, out of mind.
“The ATS becomes invisible,” says Siadhal. “It’s not my job to play with an ATS. It’s an AI agent’s job to go and fiddle with that.”
Recruiters won’t spend their days moving candidates between stages or logging notes. Nolan and Siadhal call this “work about work,” which is low-value adding and perfect for agent AIs.
“The work about work is dying for sure,” says Nolan. “And AI is gonna help kill it.”
5. Outreach messaging gets overwhelmed by “slop”
While sourcing automation tools are already succeeding at scale, Nolan doesn’t have the same level of optimism for outreach. “Outreach automation will be an unmitigated disaster,” Nolan says plainly. “It's already bad. And it's going to get way worse in 2026.”
We all need to brace ourselves for a tidal wave of spam. “The amount of AI slop we are going to see will reach unprecedented levels.”
Just as AI-powered sales emails cause real reputational damage to the companies sending them, recruiters need to be careful. But this also creates a potential competitive advantage: “There’s significant alpha for intentional, custom, thoughtful messages to candidates.”
This is the other key benefit of AI-automated sourcing becoming the norm. Recruiters can now devote more focused time and energy to the next step: crafted outreach messages that really break through to candidates.
6. A lack of tech opportunities leads to social unrest
One of the most provocative predictions from this conversation is the second-order effects of AI-driven efficiency. As headcounts shrink and job seeker competition increases, many highly paid roles disappear.
Tech workers accustomed to cushy working conditions and healthy salaries are rapidly seeing fewer opportunities. And we could soon see real social and political conflict as a result.
“I think the next era of social unrest comes from white-collar tech workers,” Nolan predicts. “You’re going to have this huge subset of people who have added value to companies that can no longer add value in the same way. They're going to feel the rug pull.”
We’ve seen headcounts reducing for the past few years, with the biggest impact on graduates hiring. “They tend to be keeping the more tenured people,” says Siadhal. “Which obviously makes sense, because they're more experienced.”
But the problems will come for experienced staff too, says Nolan, who are generally less AI-native. “Because their skill set is no longer valuable in tech companies, they have to go to another segment of the economy. They're going to get repriced on the market in a very brutal way.”
7. “Agent managers” become a high-ranking role
On the other hand, an increase in AI orchestrations gives rise to new positions. Siadhal predicts an entirely new management class: people whose job is to manage AI agents, not humans.
“You are a manager, and you have no human forms of intelligence that you manage. You purely manage artificial intelligence.”
“I could totally see one person in charge of agent sourcing,” agrees Nolan. “You’ve got to calibrate the agent, to make sure that it's getting all the right inputs. You’ve got to search for new agents. And you're the captain of the ship.”
Siadhal sees these as high-status, high-impact positions focused on agent performance, calibration, and outcomes. And communication—a core management skill—may be even more important when managing non-human systems.
“There are some people who are better at that than others, and those people will be agent managers. It's going to be a high-status management role.”
8. Non technical people get $100M offers
2025 saw eye-watering compensation for AI researchers. And Nolan believes the next wave targets non-technical talent. Because once these companies have the very best engineers and AI theorists in place, they’ll start looking for advantages across the rest of the business.
“We’ve got to go sell it to the people, and we’ve got to grow it, and then we’ve got to build the rest of the team. 2026 will be the year where crazy things happen for non technical talent.”
Models alone don’t win. Companies need elite operators in sales, growth, recruiting, and leadership to unlock gains through technology. “You’re going to start to see the Yankees or Dodgers of tech companies,” Nolan explains. “Elite at every position on the field.”
Siadhal explains the point of view of a breakthrough AI executive. “We've invested so much in building this AI machine. Billions and billions of dollars. Can we really afford to have a VP of sales who isn't absolutely the best?”
How these companies determine the best will be interesting. But we’re sure to see some astounding salaries in the very near future.
9. AI infrastructure moves into business apps
As foundation models mature, Nolan and Siadhal see labs like OpenAI moving closer to end-user workflows. Rather than staying infrastructure-only, these companies will increasingly own business applications—where distribution, data, and feedback loops live.
Just like Google made email and word processing available in your browser, business flows will increasingly run on agentic AI.
“If I'm having a conversation with Claude, I'm likely going to email one of my team,” says Siadhal. So why wouldn’t companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google power these interactions directly? “I’ll be able to instruct the agent to go and do it. It's more baked into the interaction you have with the AI. A bit more invisible.”
Corporate workflows will change drastically in the coming years, largely based on the business tasks that these AI builders choose to invest in.
10. Human data extraction leads to backlash
Finally, Siadhal predicts a reckoning around how AI systems are trained. Today, companies pay experts to encode entire professions into models—known as human data extraction.
“We're looking for an accountant, and we're going to pay you tons of money to train our AI to do what you do. And that's happening across every job you can imagine.”
This presents a moral and economic dilemma: those individuals are compensated, but their industry colleagues don’t get the same opportunities. And eventually, entire job categories may be displaced.
“And I think there will end up being a backlash.” Whether that backlash is regulatory, cultural, or activist-driven, Siadhal believes it’s inevitable once the practice becomes widely understood.
“It's sort of like a prisoner’s dilemma. If we give the AIs all of our expertise, then they'll do more and more of our work. And that'll be a good thing if the machines can do it better, because we can focus on other things that the machines can't do.”
But there is certainly a pessimistic case that sees AI replacing whole classes of workers entirely. And we’ll see more pushback and public outcry as a result. “These companies are getting quite large, and they're not really telling the world this is exactly what we do. At some point, people are going to work it out.”
The future of recruiting belongs to AI optimists
These predictions paint a future where recruiting is faster, more automated, and more polarized. AI removes massive amounts of friction, and lets recruiters put their true talents and differentiators to better use. There's a lot to be excited about.
But the future also promises some awkward transitions and uncomfortable trade-offs.
So it pays to be prepared and open minded. The winners in 2026 will be the ones who understand where humans still matter most.
If you want to hear the full debates and disagreements behind these predictions, check out the full podcast episode:
