- The hiring environment for US tech job seekers — particularly those looking for entry-level and early career roles — has become more challenging, beyond the direct effects of the plunge in tech job postings since 2022.
- Postings for senior and manager-level tech jobs have dropped sharply from their earlier peak, but as of early 2025, were still closer to their pre-pandemic levels (down 19%) than standard and junior tech titles (down 34%).
- Experience requirements in tech job postings have also tightened. Between the second quarters of 2022 and 2025, the share of tech postings looking for at least 5 years of experience rose from 37% to 42% between the second quarters of 2022 and 2025 — at the expense of postings looking for 2-4 years of experience.
- This shift could be related to the rise of AI, as it began in 2023 (after the crash in tech postings was well underway) and has been concentrated in tech occupations rather than the broader economy.
- Tech job postings still accounted for 37% of the job applications started by tech workers in June 2025 (identified based on their Indeed profiles), slightly above the share three years earlier, highlighting how job seeker interest has held up despite the decline in opportunities.
Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of pieces examining job postings trends among tech and mathematics occupations. For more on the boom and bust in tech job postings, please see our companion piece here.
With a few exceptions (including some AI-related job titles), hiring appetite for tech workers has cratered across a wide swath of the sector. But the plunge in tech job postings on Indeed that began in early 2022 has hit less-experienced job seekers particularly hard, reflecting both a continuation of some trends present during the earlier boom, and ways the market has (and hasn’t) changed during the bust.
Postings for senior-level job titles faring somewhat better than their standard counterparts
Job titles don’t just convey the type of work someone will do in a job, but also their role within an organization. Grouping tech jobs between those with job titles featuring terms conveying seniority (like “senior,” “lead”, or “principal”) or positions in management, and those that don’t, job postings for senior roles have held up somewhat better than others. In February 2025, tech job postings for senior (and other higher-level) job titles were down 19% from five years earlier, while standard (or junior) job titles were down 34%.
The contrast in strength between senior and non-senior tech titles isn’t just a recent trend. In fact, the two categories of postings have plunged similarly since 2022, highlighting how the market has cooled across the board. However, senior-level and managerial opportunities grew faster during the earlier boom. That gap has persisted, leaving more-experienced tech job seekers in a somewhat better position than newer entrants.
This same pattern holds when we zoom in to compare individual senior-level tech job titles with their standard counterparts. Demand for specific types of tech jobs tends to correlate across higher and lower levels of seniority (e.g., postings are weak for both senior and non-senior Java developers, while strong for senior and non-senior machine learning engineers). However, compared to early 2020, job postings for more senior-level tech titles have fared better than their standard counterparts for over three-quarters of title-pairs with sufficient data.
Experience requirements in tech postings have shifted outward
While both senior and non-senior tech postings have plunged since mid-2022, among the opportunities that remain, employers are looking for somewhat more experienced candidates.
Explicitly entry-level roles account for a relatively small share of the tech job postings on Indeed, and their share of the (shrinking) market has remained fairly stable. In Q2 2025, just 18% of US tech postings that mentioned experience requirements (including ones that list “no experience needed”) advertised they were open to candidates with one year or less of relevant experience, up slightly from 17% in Q2 2022.
Instead, there’s been a shift in postings increasingly asking for more substantial levels of experience, at the expense of opportunities for early career professionals. The share of postings open to those with 2 to 4 years of experience fell from 46% in mid-2022 to 40% in mid-2025, while the share looking for at least 5 years of experience rose from 37% to 42%. These shifts were evident among both senior and non-senior-level tech job titles.
The rise in experience requirements has been unique to tech, which could be an AI effect
The tightening of tech experience requirements could be related to the same forces behind the overall plunge in demand for tech workers. However, unlike the drop in postings themselves, the timing of the shift lines up more closely with the rise of AI than the changing macroeconomy: While tech postings began to fall in mid-2022, experience requirements only started being extended in early 2023 — not long after Chat GPT-3 went public — a trend that’s carried into mid-2025.
Meanwhile, the rise in postings geared towards more experienced candidates has been concentrated in tech. In other occupations, the share of postings mentioning experience that were looking for at least 5 years eased from a 16% 3-month average in Q2 2022 to 11% in Q2 2025. This includes declines in several fields such as marketing, administrative assistance, and human resources.
Like math and tech occupations, job posting trends in these white-collar roles have also been weak, and the tasks required in these roles overlap with the strengths of current GenAI models. However, tech postings differ in that actual mentions of artificial intelligence are much higher, suggesting either the application or production of AI is much more central to tech roles.
This greater connection to AI could be one reason that experience requirements have tightened in tech but not elsewhere. On one hand, employers looking to hire tech workers are likely more comfortable adopting the technology, potentially to automate tasks often performed by early-career employees. Another possibility is that the skills of more experienced tech workers are at a greater premium when organizations integrate AI into their workflow. Either way, the situation has created an additional hurdle for less-experienced tech workers in an already challenging job market.
Tech workers remain interested in tech jobs, while other job seekers have shifted away somewhat
The tech hiring environment has turned decisively against job seekers, but that doesn’t mean tech workers are looking to leave the sector more often than they used to.
As the boom in the tech market began to wane in mid-2022, 35% of job applications started by US-based job seekers whose most recent role was in tech or mathematics occupations, according to their Indeed profile, were on tech job postings themselves. This share fluctuated over the following two years, dipping below 30% in 2024, but rebounded back to 37% in June 2025, slightly higher than where it started. Other Indeed research tracking job seekers who changed employers between 2022 and 2024 found that job switchers working in software development were more likely to remain in the field than job switchers in other occupations were likely to stay in theirs.
Interest in tech jobs from other job seekers has followed a similar pattern, but unlike tech workers, their share of total applications going to tech postings has slipped somewhat. In May 2025, 1.9% of all applications started by job seekers whose recent occupation was outside of tech or math were on tech postings, down from 2.2% three years earlier. However, given how the total pool of tech postings to apply for has plunged by over half during this period, the moderate decline in application share suggests job seekers from across the economy are still interested in entering the tech sector.
Both demand and supply contributing to job seeker challenges
The falling quantity and changing characteristics of tech job postings in recent years have impacted tech job seekers across the board. Still, the effects have likely been harsher for younger and less-experienced workers. Fewer job openings mean both fewer entry points into the field and shrinking opportunities to move up the job ladder. And the generally weaker market for non-senior roles puts an additional squeeze on less-experienced professionals, while employers increasingly look for candidates with at least five years of experience. This, in turn, brings a cascading effect on newer entrants to the market, as in a strong market, job hopping among early-career workers would normally open up entry-level positions to others.
One trend that would help individual job seekers would be if their competition (i.e., other job seekers) started looking for work elsewhere. But as of mid-2025, job seekers with recent tech experience continue to apply to tech jobs at rates similar to those from the earlier boom, while those from outside the sector have shifted away moderately. As a result, competition among job seekers for available tech job opportunities remains stiff.
At the moment, current tech workers appear to be waiting out the cold hiring market. But if tech hiring appetite doesn’t start to rebound from its ongoing slump, job seekers — including recent grads who might have otherwise entered the field — are likely to look elsewhere.
Methodology
For the purposes of this post, job postings for tech and mathematics occupations refer to job titles classified as one of the following occupational categories according to Indeed’s taxonomy structure: software development, information design and technology, IT operations and help desk, and mathematics. The same occupations are also used when sorting job seekers based on their most recent work experience, according to their Indeed profile. These categories include many management positions, but might miss some tech-related job titles that are classified under the “management” occupational category.
Tech job postings are considered as “senior” or managerial positions if their job title includes terms like “manager,” “supervisor,” “senior,” “principal,” or “lead.” Those that do not include these terms are considered “standard/junior” positions.
Data on the share of postings mentioning experience requirements only consider postings that specifically mention a desired level of experience (including no experience).
