21. September 2026
The Personio Index: Job descriptions increasingly demand AI skills
Anna Jager-Elliott
Welcome to Personio Pulse: This Week in HR, where each week we take a look at the latest trends in the world of work, what you need to know about them, and what they mean for you as an HR professional.
This week, we're looking at new data from the Q3 Personio Index, showing how fast AI skills are becoming a baseline hiring requirement.
What you need to know
AI-specific skills barely featured in job postings two years ago. Today they define a growing share of what employers look for, starting with technical roles but not stopping there.
The Personio Index tracks mentions of named tools like Claude, Llama and ChatGPT, plus terms like prompt engineering and agentic AI, across job postings. For software engineering roles, that share climbed from 3.2% in Q1 2024 to 24.5% by Q3 2026. Every other function saw mentions rise from under 1% to 9.6%: a smaller base, but nearly 11 times its starting point.
Software engineering is still where organisations are placing the bulk of their AI hiring bets. But if relative growth elsewhere keeps outpacing it, that focus will need to widen.
What others are saying about it
The pattern extends well beyond hard-to-fill technical roles, and staffing leaders are already reframing how they talk about the shortage.
"The rise of AI skills to the top of the shortage list reflects how quickly the talent landscape is evolving," says Jonas Prising, Chair and CEO of ManpowerGroup, whose 2026 Talent Shortage survey of 39,000 employers across 41 countries found AI-related capabilities now rank as the hardest skills to find worldwide — ahead of traditional engineering and IT roles for the first time.
What that means for you
Audit your last 20 non-technical job descriptions against the 9.6% benchmark: If you're below it (ie. fewer than two mention AI skills), pick two to three roles and add a named AI task to each before your next hiring round, rather than waiting for a broader policy.
Replace one generic AI-training session with three role-specific ones: Build separate workshops for recruiting, finance, and customer support around the prompts each team would actually use.
Add a hands-on AI task to the interview: Ask non-technical candidates to complete a short AI-assisted exercise, like drafting a brief with a named tool, so what you screen for actually matches what the posting asks for.
What else should I read?
The Personio Index report, Q3 2026: The full data behind this week's numbers, tracking European workforce trends in real time.
That's all for this edition of Personio Pulse: This Week in HR.
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