Entry-level job market trends and what it means for your organization.

If you follow workforce trends, you may have seen some encouraging signs recently about entry-level hiring. After a couple of lean years, the headline numbers suggest a rebound is underway.

But if you stop at that headline, you're missing the real story. Dig one layer deeper and the picture looks very different — and for many organizations, considerably more concerning.

What does the entry-level job market data say

The preliminary data from Mercer Benchmark Database (MBD) seems to confirm that the overall headline is misleading. MBD reports that the share of entry-level new hires in non-technical roles climbed back to around 40% in 2026, recovering from a low of about 23% in 2025. When you break the 2026 non-tech entry-level data down by job family though, you quickly see that Hospitality and Retail both saw meaningful increases in entry-level new hire share. Since they represent a large share of total non-tech incumbents, they move the overall number significantly.

That's not a bad thing in itself. It means the purported recovery in entry-level hiring is largely a story about food service, lodging, and retail hiring, not a broad-based rebound in professional or office roles. If your workforce isn't concentrated in those sectors, the aggregate trend isn't your trend.

In fact, for most white-collar job families, entry-level new hire rates have continued to fall pretty dramatically. Here's what the data shows from 2023 to 2026:

• Supply Chain: down 23 percentage points (44.9% to 21.6%)
• Healthcare/Pharmacy Services: down nearly 30 percentage points (39.0% to 9.6%)
• Insurance: down 17 percentage points (40.7% to 23.6%)
• Human Resources: down 14 percentage points (26.8% to 12.7%)
• Customer Service & Contact Center: down 13 percentage points (53.3% to 39.9%)

These represent sustained, multi-year declines in the share of early-career talent entering some of the most important functions in most organizations.

Supply chain deserves special attention

If there's one number in this data that should stop you cold, it's the Supply Chain figure. Not only has the entry-level new hire rate fallen by 23 percentage points since 2023, but Supply Chain also accounts for a large share of total non-tech incumbents. That combination means it's the single largest drag on the aggregate trend, responsible for roughly 74% of the total decline in entry-level hiring across non-tech roles.

Think about what that means practically. Supply Chain organizations are hiring proportionally far fewer early-career employees than they were just three years ago. That's a skills pipeline that is quietly narrowing and will create real talent shortages in the years ahead if the trend continues.

Understanding what peers are paying and hiring at every level — including entry-level — is critical for Supply Chain leaders right now. Mercer’s Logistics and Supply Chain Compensation Survey gives you that granularity, so you can see where your hiring strategy and compensation structure sit relative to the market.

Why this matters for your workforce planning

The entry-level pipeline isn't just an HR metric. It's a leading indicator of your future talent supply. When organizations consistently reduce their intake of early-career employees, a few things tend to follow:

• The internal bench thins out. Fewer junior employees means fewer people ready to move into mid-level roles in three to five years.
• Dependency on lateral hiring increases. Organizations compensate by hiring experienced talent from the outside, a move that is typically more expensive and harder to sustain at scale.
• Pay compression can accelerate. When experienced hires command premium pay and internal pipelines are thin, the gap between what you pay new hires and what you pay long-tenured employees can start to narrow in uncomfortable ways.

None of this happens overnight. But it does happen. And the organizations that catch it early are the ones that tend to manage it best.

What you should do with this information

The key takeaway here isn't that entry-level hiring is in freefall everywhere — it isn't. But the aggregate numbers are masking significant divergence across job families, and recognizing that divergence matters for how you plan. Knowing what to do and what not to do will help in your planning strategy, including the following actions:

1. Don't benchmark against the wrong peer group.

If you're in Supply Chain, Insurance, or Healthcare, looking at broad industry averages will give you a false sense of where things stand. You need function-level benchmarks that reflect what's actually happening in your job families. The Mercer Benchmark Database gives you a key granular resource for breaking the data down by job family, career level, and industry so you're comparing like for like.

2. Pressure-test your talent pipeline assumptions.

If your organization has been pulling back on entry-level hiring over the last few years now is a good time to model what that means for your mid-level talent supply three to five years from now. Reviewing the job families and levels reported in Mercer Benchmark Database can help you compare how your workforce composition compares to your peers.

3. Participate in the survey.

The richer the data, the more useful these benchmarks become for everyone. If your organization isn't yet contributing to Mercer’s rich database, joining gives you discounted access to the most comprehensive compensation and workforce data available, including the function-level and career-level breakdowns that make insights like these possible.

The bottom line

Aggregate data can tell you a story. But it doesn't always tell you the right story. The apparent rebound in entry-level hiring looks encouraging on the surface, but for most professional job families, the decline has continued, and in some functions it has accelerated sharply.

The organizations that will navigate this best are the ones that look past the headline, understand what's happening in their specific functions, and use that insight to get ahead of the talent pipeline challenges that are quietly building.

The 2026 Mercer Benchmark Database gives you the data to look ahead with confidence. The question is whether you act on it now — or wait until the entry-level hiring gap becomes a problem you can't ignore.

Learn more about the Mercer Benchmark Database and how to access the data. Looking for additional assistance? We’re here to help give us a call at 855-286-5302 or email surveys@mercer.com.

About the author

Rebecca Hall, Principal

Rebecca spent much of her career working in compensation in various corporate roles then transitioning to consulting with Mercer. Her current role, as the Content Leader for imercer.com, allows her to leverage her knowledge of human resources and talent strategy to create materials supporting Mercer’s Products & Services in North America.