UK job postings sat 11% below where they started 2026 as of 17 July, and 32% below their pre-pandemic baseline, according to Indeed data released this month. At the same time, postings for software developers rose 14%, driven almost entirely by senior roles and jobs tied directly to AI. Those two numbers, moving in opposite directions inside the same market, tell you more about hiring in Britain right now than any single headline figure could.
Indeed's economist Jack Kennedy calls it a two-speed labour market, and the data backs him up. AI or related technology was mentioned in a record 9.4% of UK job postings by the end of June, up from a much smaller share a year earlier. That's no longer confined to engineering and data roles either. Employers are now asking for AI literacy in marketing, HR, finance and scientific research, functions where the total number of open roles is shrinking even as the proportion mentioning AI keeps climbing. Searches for AI-related roles on Indeed have grown sevenfold since ChatGPT launched, with "engineer" and "trainer" the two most common terms jobseekers pair with it.
The flip side is bleak for anyone without a foothold already. Manufacturing postings are down 58% since June 2022. Graduate vacancies are running about 7% below last year and are at their weakest point for this time of year since 2020. Summer jobs, the seasonal roles in hospitality and retail that used to be a reliable entry route, hit a four-year low. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has pointed to a "low hire, low fire" economy as the reason youth unemployment is at its highest level in over a decade. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has been pushing technical qualifications as the answer, arguing in a recent video that AI can write an essay but it can't make a train. The Indeed figures suggest that argument only holds for people who already have several years of experience behind them. The senior AI-linked roles that are hiring aren't the ones a new graduate can walk into.
Pay is telling a similar story of a market pulling apart. Posted wage growth slowed to 3.9% annually in the three months to June, the weakest rate since February 2022, but that average hides a split: pay growth stayed strongest in technology, healthcare and engineering, where skilled workers remain scarce, while wage pressure eased across the lower-paid roles that saw the sharpest post-pandemic rises.
There's a smaller, quieter data point worth flagging too. Salary transparency in UK job ads has been drifting the wrong way. Around 58% of postings included pay information in the three months to June, down from a peak of 64% in early 2025. That's still well ahead of where the UK sat a couple of years ago, but it's a step back at exactly the moment jobseekers most need to know what a role actually pays before they spend hours tailoring an application for it.
None of this is uniform across sectors. IT and engineering roles, where AI is taking over routine tasks and making experienced staff more valuable rather than replacing them, have held up better than most. Retail, hospitality and white-collar functions more exposed to substitution, accounting and marketing among them, have seen postings fall by double digits.
If you're applying into this market, the practical takeaway is that generic applications are getting weeded out faster and AI-literate framing on a CV now matters even in functions that have nothing to do with technology. That's exactly the gap our ATS checker and JD decoder are built to close: the ATS checker flags whether your CV is actually parsing the way an applicant tracking system reads it, and the JD decoder pulls out the specific skills language a posting is screening for, AI-related or not, so you're not guessing at what a two-speed market is actually asking for.