HUMAN CAPITAL PULSE: TECHNOLOGY · ISSUE 9 · SEPTEMBER 2026
A monthly Human Capital benchmark for HR and People leaders in Technology: the sector's talking points and how culture, workforce and talent compare across your peers, built on Deltabase data covering 5,500+ companies and 11M employee reviews.
Editor's note
September's talent story is about shape as much as size. Uber cut 10% of staff to strip out management layers, UK IT vacancies were forecast to rise by a fifth, and ManpowerGroup found tech employers prizing AI literacy alongside professionalism and critical thinking. This issue looks at who the sector's biggest employers are hiring, how senior their tech teams are, and how employees rate their career prospects.
Leroy Hall, Deltabase
The month in three
1. Uber cuts 10% and flattens its management
What happened: Uber is cutting 10% of its workforce, targeting middle management and "micro-teams" where managers have one or two direct reports, and has cut by 20% the number of employees seven or more layers below the CEO. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also wrote that "only ~1% of employees will be remote", Axios reported.
The Deltabase lens: Workforce: Layering varies widely across tech functions. Director-and-above roles make up 6.9% of Oracle's Tech profiles, against 3.9% at Alphabet, 2.7% at Microsoft and 1.3% at IBM.
So what: Spans and layers are now a board-level efficiency question. Know where your structure sits against peers before an investor or new CEO asks.
2. UK IT vacancies forecast to rise 20.4%
What happened: The Vacancysoft and APSCo IT Sector Trends Report forecast a 20.4% rise in UK IT professional vacancies in 2026, with Q2 vacancies 22.3% above a year earlier. It describes a selective market in which hiring has levelled off at a higher level as businesses move from AI trials to implementation.
The Deltabase lens: Talent: The core engineering skill is unevenly spread: 51.0% of Microsoft's workforce lists software development, 49.4% at SAP and 43.1% at Oracle, against 17.8% at Apple.
So what: Selective hiring rewards employers who know exactly which skills they lack. Start the plan from a skills baseline, not a headcount number.
3. Tech employers want AI literacy and human skills
What happened: ManpowerGroup's Q4 survey of 4,258 tech employers in 42 countries put the global tech Net Employment Outlook at 37%. Professionalism and work ethic (44%) and critical thinking (39%) led the human skills sought, while AI literacy (34%) topped the technical list.
The Deltabase lens: Culture: Learning & Development is a sector strength: median NSS across our ten companies was +63.8% in 2025, up from +63.3%, led by Arm (+77.8%) and IBM (+70.4%), with Salesforce lowest at +50.8%.
So what: Employees already rate tech learning highly; point it at AI literacy and the human skills employers say they cannot find.
Stat of the month
6 of 10: Technology Top 100 companies hired more people in January–August 2026 than a year earlier, while Career Progression NSS is negative at nine of the ten.
| Company | Turnover: new hires, Jan–Aug 2026 (vs 2025) | Workforce: entry-level share of Tech function | Culture: Career Progression NSS, 2025 |
|---|
| IBM | 50,772 (+75.8%) | 29.4% | −56.4% |
| Alphabet (Google) | 45,940 (+27.3%) | 53.4% | −49.1% |
| Microsoft | 37,969 (+28.6%) | 18.7% | −47.8% |
| Oracle | 26,360 (+37.5%) | 21.3% | −75.8% |
| Meta Platforms | 24,666 (−16.0%) | 43.0% | −4.5% |
| SAP | 13,610 (−24.5%) | 31.1% | −35.5% |
Source: Deltabase Employee Turnover data, new hires January–August 2026 vs January–August 2025; Deltabase Workforce data, entry-level share of profiles in the Tech function; Deltabase Culture data, Employee Net Sentiment Score (−100% to +100%), 2025. Counts across Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta Platforms, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and Arm Holdings.
Spotlight: Oracle vs Salesforce
Two enterprise software rivals hiring at the same pace with very different employee views. Both grew new hires by about 37% in January–August 2026: 26,360 at Oracle and 15,893 at Salesforce. On Culture, Salesforce scored +13.3% overall in 2025 (2,460 reviews) against −1.4% at Oracle (4,091 reviews), with Pay & Rewards at +69.8% against −11.2% and Career Progression at −37.6% against −75.8%. On Talent, Salesforce is further into AI, with 34.7% listing AI skills against 12.6% at Oracle, while cloud skills are close at 38.6% and 35.5%. Median tenure is 5.9 years at Oracle and 4.1 years at Salesforce.
For your People team
- Map spans and layers in your Tech function against named peers before the next efficiency review.
- Build 2027 hiring plans from a skills baseline, separating AI literacy from specialist AI roles.
- Give every new joiner a visible progression route; hiring volume alone will not fix Career Progression sentiment.
See how your Human Capital compares with your Technology peers. Book a 30-minute benchmark walkthrough across culture, workforce and talent. Book a walkthrough →
Sources: Axios (2 September 2026); Vacancysoft and APSCo, IT Sector Trends Report, August 2026 (4 September 2026); ManpowerGroup, via PR Newswire (22 September 2026); Deltabase Culture data; Deltabase Workforce data; Deltabase Talent data; Deltabase Employee Turnover data.