Tech Hiring Trends 2025: AI Roles, Job Hunt Tips & Market Shifts

Hiring in the tech industry, as well as—perhaps more importantly—hiring for tech roles across all industries is gaining traction once again, following widespread layoffs in 2022-23.

Data from Codesmith 2024 graduates has shed light on significant changes seen in the market, regarding how to approach job hunting, application styles, industries and roles.

Here are five of the standout changes early career engineers should know about to succeed in tech today.

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1. Far Fewer Phones Screens

‍Only 2% of applications are leading to a phone screen—a 58% fall from 3.8% the previous year.

‍Why Are Grads Struggling To Pass The First Hurdle?

Simply put, today’s market holds new challenges that are obstructing aspiring candidates’ visibility to employers.

More Applications

From October 2023 to November 2024 in the USA, software engineering jobs—meaning 0–3 YOE—increased by 47%, equalling over 71,000 job posts.

But this precipitated a surge in applications. In October 2024, employers saw “a 500% increase in applications“ compared to 2023.

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Experienced Engineers Applying For Roles Below Their Level

This increase is partly due to three years of layoffs. Layoffs.fyi states:

• 2022 saw 165,000 layoffs across 1000 tech companies
• 2023 saw an increase to 264,000
• 2024 saw decrease to 150,000 across 520 tech companies

100,000s of experienced engineers spilling back into the job market means:

• More competition for each role in numbers of applicants
• Newly aspiring candidates must compete against engineers over qualified for roles they apply to

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New Tech Hubs Producing SWEs To Compete In A Remote World

In 2024 Latin America emerged as a new hub producing software engineers competing for remote roles in the USA and Europe.

Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia lead the pack in producing senior engineers for the market. While Mexico and Brazil alone produce 600,000 SWEs every year.

This was welcomed in tech, as in all US industries, as 2024 saw a 156% increase in demand from USA companies seeking LATAM professionals, who offer cost-effective solutions to hiring needs, on the same or similar time zones to the USA.

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AI Changed Employer Demands For Early Career Roles

The shape of most employer’s expectations for engineers entering the industry has evolved rapidly.

Desire for traditional software engineer and fullstack developer roles has given way to demands for engineers joining the workforce to come equipped with knowledge of AI infrastructure and machine learning.

PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer shows AI-related roles are expanding 3.6x faster than the average job, while a Microsoft survey of 31,000 employers, found AI trainer, AI data specialist, and AI security specialist are now the top roles companies plan to add in 2025.

This in turn requires a much higher level of understanding of complex fundamental algorithms and data structures.

Codesmith, without losing sight of its flagship Software Engineering +AI/ML Immersive program, has adapted by launching the AI & ML Technical Leadership program to help residents meet this demand.

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Ghost Roles

Ghost Roles—a new complaint of LinkedIn and other platforms—are postings that are unlikely to lead to a phone screen for the applicant for a number of reasons.

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Why do companies do this:

• To give an impression they are growing—usually to signal to investors they are a worthy investment
• Companies often like to gather résumés to build a pool of potential candidates for future job roles, or in hopes that the perfect candidate may apply, even if the role doesn’t exist
• Some regions require companies to publicly post a role even if they plan to fill it internally

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Tips To Identify Ghost Roles:

• The post has been up for months with no updates
• The company is known to be laying off staff or under a hiring freeze
• You apply and never hear back—not even an automated rejection
• The job is reposted repeatedly without any apparent changes
• The post contains little detail about the role and is vague and generic

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Tips To Avoid Ghost Roles:

• Look for hiring information/insights on Glassdoor or Blind at that company
• Use LinkedIn's "posted X days ago" filters to identify and avoid stale listings
• Analyze the recruiter or hiring manager’s recent activity on LinkedIn under their ‘Activity’ section. 

Are they: 

• still posting about hiring and sharing openings?

• liking or commenting on job posts?
• engaging with company content about hiring?
• still even at that company?
• active on LinkedIn in the last 30–60 days?

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ATS Blocking

Application Tracking Systems can streamline hiring for companies, improve candidate quality, and also save large amounts of money.

However, they are also hindering suitable candidates for job roles arbitrarily. ATS often has an overreliance on keywords and keyword searches in candidates’ résumés. 

ATS struggles to understand if a candidate's experience is recent, to understand résumés using different keywords to describe the same experience as another candidate, and to understand the length of employment of a candidate’s résumé.

Many candidates are now bypassing ATS by filling their applications with keywords known to be flagged by ATS as a potential suitable candidate, often ranking higher above genuinely more qualified candidates.

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AI Bot Applications

AI-assisted applications allowing candidates to apply to more jobs more quickly has boosted the number of applications to an extent that all jobs see higher competition than in the past.

AI Blaze and Agentic AI, for example, automate job applications by filling out forms and submitting résumés. 

Another of its uses, further muddying the waters of SWE hiring, is that these tools can now also pass applicant tracking systems (ATS) by helping you to incorporate relevant keywords. 

Meaning that the often arbitrary AI tools used by employers to filter out unsuitable candidates is now being circumvented by other AI tools.

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2. Phone Screen → Technical Interviews Rising

Despite difficulties getting phone screens, the percentage of applicants converting phone screens to technical interviews has risen from 32.11% in 2023 to 39.14% in 2024—a rise of 21.90%.

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Why?

• Following three months of intensive coding, Codesmith grads are far better prepared for an interview focused on their technical abilities.

• By the technical interview stage, ATS is out of the way, and their applications aren’t being thrown in the bin based on a keyword in their resume.

Codesmith grads can often really stand out in this stage given their training is geared towards coding and building projects.

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Technical Assessments

Live coding challenges, take-home assignments, and verbal technical questions are consistently the most popular assessment type.

Live coding challenge/interviews accounted for 73.72% of Codesmith grad’s technical assessments in 2024.

Take-home assignments came second, making up for 64.10%, and verbal technical questions came third, comprising 54.49%.

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The average number of technical assessments in an interview process was 1.5 in 2024.

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Technical Assessment → Final Round Interviews Rising

2024 saw a rise of 6.62% in grads progressing from the technical assessment rounds to the final round of interviews, with 53.79% of grads making the jump versus 50.45% in 2023.

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Final Round → Offer

2024 saw 51.58% of grads succeed in getting an offer after the final round interview.

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3. Easy Applys: High Volume, Low Expectation

Easy Applys, or Quick/Cold Applys accounted for 698.16 of Codesmith grad’s applications out of a total of 825.82. 

This marks an 83.71% increase from 380.04 in 2023, albeit the average total number of applications in 2023 stood much lower, at 456.82.

This is in line with the experiences outside of Codesmith, where an experiment on job applications found that the average job receives an enormous 834 Easy Apply applications, with only 3% of those getting a human review.

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What Does This Mean?

In today’s market a far higher number of applications are needed to succeed against higher competition—both in quality and quantity.

However, aspiring candidates are seeing less success with Easy Applys.

Tips For Applications:

• Candidates are still receiving phone screens, and subsequent technical assessments and job offers through Easy Applys—so it is still worth the time to make Easy Applys (just be aware the volume must be much higher and the expectation lower)
• To compound an Easy Apply, follow up each one with a personal message to the recruiter or hiring manager on LinkedIn, or their work email if you have it.

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4. Referrals Rule

The importance of community and networking stood out in 2024. 

Anna Koehnk, Codesmith’s Outcomes Coordinator said that in 2024 “We found that 26.9% of offers came from referrals. These referrals were both from other Codesmith Alumni and personal networks.”

The Codesmith Alumni community continues to be an integral part of our grad’s success and ability to navigate the choppy waters of today’s tech market.

With alums working in tech roles, at all levels, at companies across all industries, it is essential that aspiring engineers lean on them as a resource for both referrals, but also advice on how to prepare for the interview processes at different companies.

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5. Roles And Industries Are Beginning To Change

Roles

Although AI is changing tech roles, as employers increasingly look for AI-focused engineers, in 2024 the most common titles grads were offered jobs in were still Software Engineer at 37.59%, Full Stack Engineer at 11.28%, and Senior Software Engineer at 9.40%.

Industry

In 2023, as in previous years before that, Tech was the primary industry grads were landing roles in, with 17% going into the Software/Tech industry.

However, in 2024, given that all industries have adopted software engineering as a core part of their growth and innovation strategy, Fintech and Healthcare both rank highest at 13.8% and 10.1% respectively. 

And for the first time Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning was recorded in industry data, although still rather nascent at 4.1%.

This is a trend we expect to see continue with the adoption of software engineering teams by more and more industries and companies, but also massive investment in AI and ML across the board as these tools become more available and necessary to growth.

At Codesmith, with the expansion of the Software Engineering Immersive into the Software Engineering Immersive + AI & ML program—alongside the launch of our AI + Technical Leadership program in January—we expect to see AI and ML account for increasingly larger chunks of our outcomes data in future.

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