For a decade, recruiting tech talent outside of the tech industry meant losing. Losing on comp, losing on brand, losing on speed. If you were staffing a data team inside a hospital system, a defense contractor, or a manufacturing plant, you were bidding against companies with unlimited budgets and a better story.

That math has changed, and the evidence comes from an unlikely place.

CBRE just released Scoring Tech Talent 2026, its annual ranking of the 50 largest tech labor markets in the U.S. and Canada. It is written for corporate real estate teams deciding where to sign leases. But read it as a talent acquisition document and a much more useful story emerges.

The tech industry is no longer where tech jobs are created

Here is the number that should reset your sourcing strategy.

Since 2022, the financial, insurance and real estate sector has added 90,530 tech talent jobs. Over that same period, the high-tech industry has cut 21,262. Professional services and the transportation, warehousing and wholesale sectors each added roughly 66,000.

Read that again. Banks, insurers, logistics operators and consultancies are out-hiring Silicon Valley for software developers, data scientists and systems managers.

The pressure release shows up in wages. The U.S. tech industry wage premium dropped to 15% in 2024 from 18% in 2023, and CBRE ties that compression directly to slower hiring by tech employers. Manufacturing, meanwhile, accounted for 95% of the high-tech industry’s new technology and engineering jobs in 2025.

For employers in healthcare, defense, manufacturing and logistics, this is the most favorable competitive position for technical hiring in years. The question is whether your recruitment marketing is built to take advantage of it.

AI is not adding roles; it is swapping them

The headline stat from the report is that AI-skilled tech workers grew 45% year over year, to 751,000 across the U.S. and Canada as of mid-2026. Total U.S. tech employment, by contrast, grew just 1.8%.

That gap is the whole story. This is substitution rather than expansion.

→ AI-related roles now make up 31% of open tech jobs in the U.S., up from 11% at the 2022 hiring peak

→ Non-AI tech job postings fell 60% over that same span → Data scientist roles grew 12.4% in 2025, and financial services led that growth, not tech

→ Job cuts employers attributed directly to AI hit 101,743 through mid-2026, versus 54,836 for all of 2025

Two implications for anyone running technical requisitions.

First, your job titles are probably stale. If your posting says “Business Intelligence Analyst” and the market is searching “ML Engineer” or “AI Systems Lead,” you are invisible in the channel where candidates are actually looking. Audit your req titles against live posting language quarterly, not annually.

Second, the candidate pool has shifted from scarce to sorted. There are more qualified technical candidates available than in 2022, but they are unevenly distributed by skill, not by geography. Volume-based sourcing will fill your funnel with the 60% of postings that are disappearing. Skills-based targeting is now the only version that works.

Remote work stopped being a differentiator

We have written before about employers quietly walking back remote flexibility. CBRE puts numbers on it.

Remote work is now mentioned in 18% of U.S. tech job postings. In the San Francisco Bay Area, that figure collapsed to 7%, down from 24% in mid-2022. CBRE notes that AI companies in particular largely require full-time, in-person work.

This cuts both ways, and most employers are only reading one side of it.

The obvious read is that you no longer have to offer full remote to compete. The more valuable read is that if the entire market has converged on three-plus days in the office, then remote flexibility is once again a genuine differentiator for the employers willing to hold it. That is a positioning decision, not an HR policy decision, and it should be made deliberately rather than by drift.

Either way, place is back on the table. Your career site, your job ads and your employer brand content need to say something specific about where the work happens and why that location is an asset. Generic “hybrid flexibility” language now differentiates nothing.

Nine markets are creating jobs. The rest are creating graduates.

CBRE tracks whether a market produces more tech jobs than tech graduates, or the reverse. This year, only nine markets were net job creators. Toronto, Calgary, Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle and Nashville led that list.

Everywhere else, graduates are outpacing openings. Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Bay Area both lost tech jobs and became the top two net graduate markets in North America.

If you are hiring early-career technical talent, that is a cost story. Supply-heavy markets mean lower cost per applicant and shorter time to fill, provided your screening can handle the volume. If you are hiring senior AI talent, it is the opposite, and the four largest AI clusters (Bay Area, New York Metro, Seattle and Washington, D.C.) hold 37% of all U.S. AI-specialty talent. Expect to pay a premium or expect to build.

Huntsville is the #1 opportunity market in North America

CBRE also ranks 25 up-and-coming markets, and Huntsville, Alabama took the top spot, ahead of Halifax, Colorado Springs, Dayton and London, Ontario.

For anyone recruiting in defense, cyber or GovCon, that ranking is validation of something already visible on the ground. Huntsville has depth in exactly the technical disciplines the defense sector needs, at a cost basis nowhere near the coastal clusters. CBRE’s cost modeling puts the annual labor and real estate spend for a 500-person tech company between $36 million in Quebec City and $91 million in the Bay Area. Huntsville sits far closer to the low end while offering a defense-specific talent concentration the low-cost markets cannot match.

The catch is that a top ranking attracts competitors. Employers with an established brand presence in Huntsville have a window, not a permanent advantage.

Action items to implement now

Four moves, in order of return.

Re-scope your competitive set. Stop benchmarking technical comp and EVP against tech companies. Benchmark against the financial services, logistics, and professional services firms actually hiring the same people. That is where your candidates are comparing offers.

Rewrite technical job ads around AI-adjacent language. Not buzzwords, actual role scope. Candidates screening for AI exposure are filtering by keyword before they read a word of your value proposition.

Make location an explicit part of your employer brand. Cost of living, commute, community, mission proximity. If the market has re-anchored to place, sell your place.

Build the pipeline before the ranking gets noticed. In opportunity markets like Huntsville, brand awareness compounds. The employers running always-on talent attraction campaigns now will own the consideration set when the competition arrives.

The tech talent market did not get easier. It got different, and for the first time in years, different favors employers who were never able to win on brand alone.