Canadian Employers Are More Optimistic Than They've Been in a Year. They Still Can't Fill the Jobs They Have.

A new survey of hiring decision-makers finds confidence climbing sharply — but the share of companies with unfillable open positions is climbing right along with it, a pairing that says more about the state of the labour market than either number alone.

Three-quarters of Canadian hiring managers — 74 percent — say they feel positive about their company's hiring outlook for the rest of 2026, according to a survey released July 8 by Express Employment Professionals, conducted by The Harris Poll. That is a sharp jump from 67 percent last fall, and the mood among respondents skews genuinely upbeat: employers most often describe their outlook as optimistic, hopeful, or confident, rather than merely stable.

The survey, part of Express's recurring Job Insights series, polled 508 Canadian hiring decision-makers between May 15 and June 1 — a window that captures sentiment heading into the back half of the year, before the summer's cooling inflation numbers and steadying unemployment rate were fully known.

The mismatch hiding inside the optimism

The confidence is translating into stated hiring plans: 43 percent of companies say they intend to increase headcount in the second half of 2026, essentially unchanged from 44 percent last fall. But sitting alongside that number is a second, less comfortable one: 32 percent of hiring managers say their company currently has open positions it cannot fill — up from 29 percent in the fall.

Read together, the two figures describe an economy where the willingness to hire has recovered faster than the ability to execute on it. Employers aren't holding back. They're trying to hire and running into a wall of qualified-candidate scarcity that outside optimism about the "outlook" does nothing to solve.

What's actually driving the hiring

Among companies planning to add staff, the reasons are operational rather than speculative. More than half — 56 percent — point to increased volumes of work. Another 44 percent are filling newly created positions, while 29 percent are backfilling turnover and 29 percent are staffing expansion into new categories or markets. None of this reads as hiring for hiring's sake; it reads as businesses responding to demand they're already seeing, which is a more durable basis for headcount growth than sentiment alone.

Not every company is expanding, of course. Nearly half of hiring managers, 47 percent, plan to hold staffing levels flat through the second half of the year, and 8 percent expect to reduce headcount — with cost pressure (60 percent) and increased automation or AI adoption (46 percent) cited as the leading reasons among that shrinking minority.