SignalHire has released its Global Jobs Report, analyzing recruiter searches from January to April 2025 and the same period in 2026. The findings reveal dramatic shifts in hiring priorities, with physical therapy roles surging and broad software engineering titles falling out of favor.
According to the report, searches for Physical Therapist grew 1,473% year over year, while Physical Therapist Assistant searches increased by 5,717%. This suggests that the physical therapy shortage, often described as a future projection, is already a crisis. "Hiring managers are not waiting for projections to materialize. They are sourcing ahead of them because the candidates they need take time to find, approach, and convert," the report states. The competition for physical therapy talent in 2026 is significantly more intense than published forecasts reflect.
In contrast, searches for Software Engineer fell 68% globally, with a 75% decline in the UK. However, this does not indicate a reduction in technical hiring. Instead, recruiters are turning to more specific titles: Java Developer searches rose 3,257% in the UK, and QA and Software Test Engineer searches increased by 567%. The report explains that "the broad title has become less useful as a search term" and that "AI tools have absorbed many of the tasks that a generalist 'software engineer' title previously covered."
SignalHire, a B2B contact intelligence platform, provides access to over 850 million verified professional profiles. The platform serves sales, recruiting, and marketing teams globally through its database, browser extension, API, and Data Enrichment workflows. The report emphasizes that for talent acquisition teams, the window between current trends and when they become widely visible in public data is critical. "The market is sorting. The data shows where it is going. The question is whether your sourcing operation is positioned to move with it," the report concludes.
