The 30-Day Talent Window: Why Smart Companies Are Hiring Right Now

I’ve been placing IT and engineering talent in Southern California for a while now. Long enough to know what a normal hiring market looks like.

This isn’t one.

More than 55,900 tech workers have lost their jobs in 2026. We’re barely into Q1. At KORE1, our IT staffing team started seeing the shift around late February, when resumes from Meta, Epic, Block, and Amazon started landing in our pipeline at a pace I haven’t seen before. Not just volume. Caliber. The kind of candidates our clients couldn’t have attracted 18 months ago at any price.

The layoff numbers are hard to overstate

In the first 74 days of 2026, 166 companies cut a combined 55,900+ positions, according to Layoffs.fyi tracking data. If the pace holds through December, total cuts will reach roughly 264,000. At that rate, 2026 would be the single worst year for tech employment since the 2001 dot-com collapse, and anyone who’s been recruiting through multiple downturns can tell you that comparison is not one I’d reach for casually.

Amazon alone shed 16,000. Block, Jack Dorsey’s fintech company, eliminated 4,000 roles. That was 40% of their workforce. The single largest AI-attributed layoff event in tech history.

Then March 25 happened.

Meta cut 700 employees across five divisions: Reality Labs, Facebook, Global Operations, Recruiting, and Sales. Second round this year. They already laid off 1,000 in January. Recruiting was hit hardest, which tells you something about where Meta thinks its hiring trajectory is headed.

Same week, Epic Games let go of over 1,000 people. Roughly 20% of the company.

“Once-in-a-lifetime quality”

Those are Tim Sweeney’s words, pulled straight from an internal memo he sent to Epic employees after the cuts went through. He said employers would see “a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks” and that “anyone with Epic Games on their resume is in the top few percent of their discipline.”

Not everyone bought the framing.

Larian Studios’ Director of Publishing Michael Douse responded publicly: “‘I didn’t fire 1,000 people, I flooded the market with once-in-a-lifetime talent’ is truly brilliant word salad, absolute LinkedIn brainrot.”

Fair point about the tone. But the underlying reality? It checks out. We’re seeing it in our own candidate pipeline every single day. Senior engineers, ML specialists, data scientists, product managers, people who were building at the highest levels of tech six weeks ago and are now actively looking. Some of them are applying to roles they never would have considered during the boom years, at companies they’d never heard of, because the market shifted that fast.

What “The Great Turnover” actually means for hiring managers

When Resume.org polled 1,000 U.S. hiring managers earlier this year, 92% said their companies have plans to bring on new people in 2026. Fifty-five percent also expect layoffs. Same year. Same companies, in a lot of cases.

They’re calling it “The Great Turnover,” and the label fits because you’ve got entire engineering departments getting dissolved on a Tuesday while the same company’s data science team down the hall is posting four new reqs on Wednesday.

Here’s the part nobody’s talking about enough. That same survey found 59% of companies admit they emphasize AI when explaining layoffs because, and I’m quoting directly, “it sounds strategic and forward-looking.” Only 9% said AI has actually fully replaced roles.

Nine percent.

Most of these cuts aren’t about robots taking jobs. They’re restructuring. And the people caught in the middle are often the most capable people in the building.

The buyer’s market has a timer on it

Let me put the current market in perspective.

That last row is the one that should worry you if you haven’t started hiring yet. When 61% of tech leaders increase headcount, the surplus evaporates. The candidates filling your inbox right now won’t be there in Q3.

I’m probably overstating the timeline slightly. Maybe it’s 45 days, not 30. But the principle holds. Buyer’s markets in tech talent don’t last. They never have.

The roles that still can’t find people

So with all this talent floating around, you’d think every open role would be easy to fill. Not even close. There are categories where the search is just as brutal as it was a year ago, and those categories happen to line up with what every company on the planet says it needs.

AI and ML job postings grew 163% year-over-year according to industry hiring data. Machine Learning Engineer postings sit 59% above early 2020 levels, per Indeed Hiring Lab analysis, even after dropping 47% from their 2022 peak.

Cybersecurity has nearly 500,000 open positions nationwide, a number that hasn’t moved much despite the layoffs because the demand for security professionals keeps climbing independently of what’s happening in the rest of tech. Forty-one percent of U.S. tech job ads now mention AI skills, a roughly 7x increase in two years.

Tech leaders surveyed for 2026 ranked their hiring priorities: AI skills at 51%, cybersecurity at 49%, system integration at 26%, and data engineering at 23%.

The paradox is real and it’s strange to live through. There’s a flood of available talent AND a shortage in the specific roles that matter most. If you need AI/ML engineering talent or cybersecurity professionals, the current surplus includes exactly the specialists you’ve been struggling to attract for the last two years. Right now, today, you can get in front of senior ML engineers and security architects who six months ago wouldn’t have returned your recruiter’s call.

That won’t be true in Q3.

Why I’m calling it 30 days

Four reasons. Maybe three and a half.

The best candidates move first. Top-tier talent from Meta, Epic, Block, and Amazon won’t sit on the market for months. Many already have competing offers. The ones I’m talking to in Orange County and LA are fielding two, three conversations simultaneously. Some of the strongest profiles we’ve seen came through our pipeline and were placed within two weeks flat.

Companies that wait will be back to fighting over the same candidates in a competitive market by summer. The 92% of companies that plan to hire in 2026 aren’t all waiting until Q4. Most say they’re starting in Q1, which means the wave of employer demand is already building and will only get louder through the spring and into early summer.

Compensation expectations are temporarily realistic. Candidates who were holding out for 30% premiums during the boom are now open to fair-market offers. I had a candidate last week, senior data engineer, five years at a FAANG, who told me he’d take a 15% cut for a hybrid role with a company that wasn’t going to restructure again in six months. That conversation doesn’t happen in a normal market.

And 87% of technology leaders feel confident about their 2026 business outlook. When that confidence converts to actual open reqs and approved headcount, the talent surplus we’re all benefiting from right now will thin out in a matter of weeks.

What to do right now

If you have open roles in IT, engineering, data, or security, the playbook is short.

Audit your open reqs today. Which roles have been sitting unfilled for 60-plus days? Those are the ones where this talent surplus changes the math completely. We had a client in Costa Mesa last month who’d been searching for a senior data analyst for four months. Filled it in under three weeks once the displaced-talent wave started. If you need a data analyst, our data analyst hiring guide covers what to look for.

Compress your interview timeline. The best displaced candidates are fielding multiple conversations right now. A four-week process loses to a two-week process every time, and I’ve watched it happen three times this month alone where a client lost their top candidate because the second interview got pushed back a week. If you’re a startup competing against enterprise hiring committees, speed is your biggest weapon. Our startup IT staffing clients are closing offers while larger companies are still scheduling panel interviews.

Know what to offer. Buyer’s market doesn’t mean you should lowball. I’ve seen companies try that in every downturn and the pattern is always the same: you save $15K on the offer, the person accepts because they need the paycheck, and then they’re gone in eight months when the market recovers because they never forgot the lowball. Check current benchmarks. The KORE1 salary negotiation guide has the framework for landing on a number that works for both sides.

Work with a staffing partner who’s tracking this in real time. The difference between landing a displaced Meta engineer and missing them by a week comes down to who sees the resume first. Our team across Orange County, LA, and San Diego has been watching these market shifts daily since January, and the speed of candidate movement right now means a 48-hour delay can cost you your top pick.

Don’t wait until Q3 to fill Q1 reqs. Talk to our team about what roles you need to move on now.

Things hiring managers are asking right now

“Is the talent really that much better than six months ago?”

Noticeably. Not slightly. Ask anyone on our team. The resumes coming across our desks right now are from people who, twelve months ago, wouldn’t have bothered responding to a recruiter’s InMail. We’re seeing candidates with 8-10 years at top-tier companies applying to mid-market roles they wouldn’t have glanced at in 2024. A 70% majority of hiring managers now say they’re considering overqualified candidates, per the Harris Poll data. That tracks with what our clients in Southern California are telling us every week, and several of them have said outright that they’re getting applications from people they’d assumed would never leave their current company.

“How fast do the best candidates actually move?”

Fastest I’ve seen in five years. A strong senior engineer or data scientist is getting callbacks within 48 hours of hitting the market. We placed a displaced cybersecurity lead from a Big Tech company in under two weeks from first contact to signed offer. The client had been trying to fill that role for three months before the layoff wave started, burning through two different agencies who kept sending candidates with the right certifications but none of the operational depth the team actually needed.

“Should we wait for salary expectations to drop further?”

Wrong move. Compensation has already adjusted. The candidates worth hiring know exactly what they’re worth, they’re just more open to fair-market rates instead of inflated boom-era numbers. If you wait another month hoping for further drops, you lose the best candidates to companies that moved this week. The window where a strong ML engineer entertains your offer at market rate instead of demanding a 25% premium is exactly the window we’re in right now.

“We’re worried about hiring someone who’ll leave when the market recovers.”

Every hiring manager worries about this during a downturn, and I’d be lying if I said the concern was completely unfounded because yes, some percentage of people hired during a downturn will jump when the market heats up again. Real talk, some will leave. But most displaced workers who land at a good company with real projects, fair pay, and a team that isn’t going to restructure again in six months? They stay. The direct hire model is designed for exactly this kind of placement, building a long-term fit, not a temp arrangement.

“Our headcount is frozen but we still have critical gaps.”

Look at contract staffing. A lot of our clients are using contract or contract-to-hire arrangements to bring in talent now without waiting for permanent headcount approval. It lets you lock in a candidate today and convert them when the freeze lifts. Over the last 60 days, our contract-to-hire placements have outpaced the volume we did in the entire previous quarter, and every one of those clients told us the same thing: they couldn’t afford to wait for a budget unlock that might not come until Q3.

Gregg Flecke is the Director of Sales at KORE1, a technology and IT staffing firm headquartered in Southern California. KORE1 connects companies across Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Diego with top-tier IT, engineering, and data talent.