Nine out of 10 companies failed to meet their hiring goals in 2025, according to new research, with one in three missing metrics by a wide margin. And for most organizations, the culprit wasn’t a shortage of candidates or a lack of effort but operational failures.

Findings from enterprise interview scheduling platform GoodTime’s 2026 Hiring Insights Report, which surveyed 504 senior talent acquisition leaders in the U.S., showed that teams reported spending 38% of their time scheduling interviews, making it the single largest operational burden in the hiring process.

In this vendor-commissioned research, the talent pros shared that the most common bottlenecks were scheduling delays, limited interviewer availability, cancellations and hiring manager conflicts. As HR leaders know, each rescheduled interview can trigger multi-day delays and each delayed response increases the odds that a qualified candidate accepts another offer.

AI agents are a success story in scheduling

The research found that the organizations that reduced time-to-hire treated scheduling as a system, not a task. They were more likely to use AI agents for interview scheduling and to prioritize improving scheduling efficiency.

Teams using automated or AI-driven scheduling were 1.6 times more likely to achieve near-perfect hiring goal attainment, with 13% hitting 90%-100% of goals compared to 8% of non-users. The faster cohort was also 40% less likely to rely on sourcing bots and 56% less likely to use chatbots for early candidate engagement.

However, AI is also inhibiting quality hiring

In 2025, skills gaps and a shortage of qualified candidates were the top hiring challenges. Now, an emerging threat is expected to take the lead in 2026, and that is fake or AI-assisted candidates.

“Resumes, answers to application questions, even online portfolios … have all lost value in the era of gen AI,” wrote Hung Lee, founder of Recruiting Brainfood, in the report. “It’s one of the most urgent tasks of TA teams today to find methods of assessment which are suitable for this era.”

Already identified by nearly one-fourth of talent acquisition leaders as a current issue, AI-generated applicants are putting pressure on hiring pipelines and making candidate evaluation more complex.

As Becky McCullough, vice president of talent acquisition and mobility at HubSpot, wrote in the GoodTime report, AI has raised the bar on verification needs. “A single background check at the end of the process isn’t enough anymore,” she said. “TA teams now have to confirm identity and authenticity at multiple points.”

What top-performing TA teams measure

There is a surprising twist revealed by the research. Top-performing TA teams were less likely to grow headcount than their underperforming peers. While 60% of underperforming teams expanded their recruiting staff, fewer than half of top performers did the same.

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