The Job Market Is Both Brutal and Booming
This is a guest piece from the authors of The Hiring Debrief, a newsletter run by Stride, an embedded recruiting firm for NYC startups. Reach out to them if you’re struggling to hire or seeking your next opportunity.
Ask a founder in this city how hiring is going and you’ll usually hear that the right person is impossible to find. Ask someone who’s been looking since the spring and you'll hear that they’re more qualified than they’ve ever been but can’t get anyone to write back.
Both of them are describing the same market, and both of them are right.
Challenger’s July report shows that tech has announced 149K job cuts so far in 2026, up 67% from the same point in 2025, and the sector now accounts for 31% of all cuts announced this year. But the same report shows July’s overall layoff total at its lowest monthly level since July 2024, with hiring plans running 25% ahead of last year.
More strong people are available than usual, more roles are open than the headlines suggest, but both sides still feel stuck. That is a matching problem where supply and demand are having a hard time finding each other.
What changed
For years, a tailored resume did real work. When a candidate read the description, reworked their bullets, and referenced the actual product, the effort itself told you something. It meant they cared enough to spend an hour they didn't have to spend.
That evidence is gone. Every application now arrives crisply written and perfectly matched. Open 300 of them and you’re looking at 300 competent, near identical documents. Finding people has never been easier, but figuring out which of them can do the job has never been harder, and most hiring tools were built for the first problem. Applicant tracking systems continue to track, sourcing platforms continue to find, but neither one tells you who’s good.
What to weigh now
If you’re hiring: Test depth over polish. The follow up questions are where AI assistance runs out and real experience holds up. Build your interview screens around a problem your team actually hit last quarter.
If you’re looking: Put something in public that shows how you think before the first call. Publish a product teardown, a postmortem, or the reasoning behind a hard call you made. It’s all evidence a resume structurally can’t hold.
Either way: Context rich channels are doing the heavy lifting right now. Referrals, warm intros, and recruiters who can speak to how someone actually operates are moving senior hires in a couple of weeks while the application pile runs 45 to 90 days.
Bottom line
There’s plenty of talent and plenty of openings. What’s scarce is the signal that tells one side which person on the other side is worth an hour of their time. Whoever supplies that first, through visible judgment, concrete outcomes, and real depth, is the one who gets picked.