Companies say they're hiring. Here's who they're hiring.

Last week KPMG released its 2026 survey of 400 US chief executives, all running companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue. The headline number was good news: 89% expect to increase headcount over the next three years.

Read one line further and the picture gets more specific. In the same release, 86% said they're "redesigning roles, career paths and team structure to reflect human-AI collaboration." Seventy-nine percent are hiring new talent with AI and tech capabilities. And 53% are still planning workforce reductions in some areas.

So yes, they're hiring. They're also cutting, and they're rewriting the jobs in between. If you've built a solid career and you're wondering where you fit, that middle number, the 86%, is the one I'd pay attention to.

Growth, but not much of it, and not everywhere

KPMG's own summary of the findings breaks the 89% down. Sixty percent of CEOs expect headcount to grow by less than 5%. Twenty-six percent expect 6% to 10%. Only 2% expect more than that.

That's modest growth over three years. Next to the 53% planning reductions, it's a familiar budget pattern: add in a few places, trim in others. The new seats don't open in the same departments that lose them. They open where the redesigned work is.

What "redesigning roles" looks like from the hiring side

When a company redesigns a role, the first thing that changes is the job description. Somebody in HR or a hiring manager sits down and rewrites what the job is for, what the person will own and what "good" looks like in year one. The old title might survive. The content underneath it often doesn't.

You can see it in the postings themselves. Indeed's Hiring Lab tracks how often US job ads mention AI, and its end-of-2025 update found the share of marketing postings mentioning AI rose from 8.4% to 14.9% over the year. In human resources it doubled, from 4.4% to 8.8%. Those aren't tech jobs. They're the kinds of roles a lot of experienced people hold right now.

When I write or approve a job description, I'm describing a problem I need solved. The resume that gets a second look is the one where I can see that person already solving it. That hasn't changed. What's changed is how the problem is being written down.

Why a resume written for 2019 misses

Most experienced professionals last rebuilt their resume when they last changed jobs, and have updated it since by adding a line at the top and trimming one at the bottom.

That resume was written to match job descriptions from that time. It probably leads with scope: team size, budget, territory, years in the seat. Those still matter. But a redesigned role tends to ask different questions first:

• What did you change, and what happened because of it?
• How do you work across functions when the process isn't settled yet?
• Have you brought a new tool or way of working into a team and made it stick?
• Can you make decisions with data, and explain them to people who don't live in the data?

Here's what I find encouraging. Experienced people usually have strong answers to every one of those. They've led teams through system changes, reorganizations and new processes more than once. The problem is that the old resume files those stories under duties ("responsible for regional operations") instead of showing them as the evidence a hiring manager is now looking for.

The person reading your resume isn't going to do that translation for you. Neither is the software that often reads it first. If the words on the page don't connect to the words in the posting, a strong career can look like a mismatch.

You don't need to become a technologist

The 79% figure, CEOs hiring for AI and tech capabilities, can sound like a door closing if you've never written code. I don't read it that way. "AI and tech capabilities" covers a wide range, and the redesigned roles that sit next to the technical ones still need people who can run things: who know how to get adoption from a skeptical team, keep a process steady while it changes, and tell a leadership group the truth about what's working.

That's operating judgment. It takes years to build, and it isn't what most new hires bring. But you have to make it visible in the language employers are using now, with specific examples, or it reads as generic experience.

What to do with this

You don't need to rewrite your career. You need to re-describe it for the roles that are actually opening. In practice that means:

1. Pull five or six current postings for the jobs you'd want next, not the job you have.
2. Note the titles, the outcomes they ask for and the words they repeat.
3. Read your resume against them honestly. Where does your experience match the work, and where does only the vocabulary fall short?
4. Rebuild the top third of the page around the two or three things those postings care about most.

That fourth step is where most people get stuck. It's hard to see your own career from the outside, and harder to cut lines you're proud of.

If you'd like someone who reads resumes from the hiring side to do that rebuild with you, our Resume Rebuild reworks your resume and LinkedIn profile around the roles you're targeting. If you'd rather start on your own, the free AI Career Score will show you where your current story is strongest and where it needs work.