SignalHire, a B2B contact intelligence platform, analyzed tens of thousands of recruiter searches between January and April 2025 and the same period in 2026, revealing significant shifts in hiring priorities. The data indicates a critical shortage of physical therapy professionals and a fundamental change in how companies search for technical talent.
The most striking finding is the surge in searches for Physical Therapist roles, which grew 1,473% year over year, while Physical Therapist Assistant searches skyrocketed 5,717%. This contradicts official forecasts that describe the physical therapy shortage as a future problem. Recruiter behavior treats it as a current crisis. Hiring managers are not waiting for projections to materialize; they are sourcing ahead because candidates take time to find, approach, and convert. The competition for physical therapy talent in 2026 is significantly more intense than any published forecast currently reflects. By the time official data confirms the shortage, recruiters who started sourcing early will have already filled their pipelines.
Conversely, searches for the broad title Software Engineer fell 68% globally year over year, and in the UK, the decline reached 75%. This does not mean companies are hiring fewer technical people. Instead, it indicates that the broad title has become less useful as a search term. Hiring managers are now searching for specific technical expertise. For instance, searches for Java Developer rose 3,257% in the UK, and QA and Software Test Engineer increased 567%. This shift reflects the reality that AI tools have absorbed many tasks previously covered by a generalist software engineer title.
The structural point beneath these trends is that for talent acquisition teams operating in these segments, the window between now and when these trends become widely visible in public data is the window that matters. The market is sorting, and the data shows where it is going. The question is whether sourcing operations are positioned to move with it.
