If you're sending a resume shaped by Netflix, HubSpot, Airtable, or Workday to banks and insurers, you're applying to a sector that posts lots of jobs and fills very few of them. BLS JOLTS data shows finance and insurance openings went from 242,000 in August 2025 to 353,000 in August 2026, but the sector's hires rate fell to 1.7%.
Are finance and insurance jobs really hiring in 2026?
Finance and insurance is posting more openings than it did a year ago, but it is hiring fewer people. Openings rose about 46% year over year. Hires fell about 20%, from 137,000 to 110,000.
JOLTS (the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly count of openings, hires, and separations by industry. Here is what the August 2026 data says about finance and insurance:
- Openings: 242K in Aug 2025, 304K in July 2026, 353K in Aug 2026. The openings rate went from 3.5% to 5.0%.
- Hires: 137K in Aug 2025, 109K in July, 110K in August. The hires rate went from 2.0% to 1.7%.
- Layoffs: up 9,000 in August. The sector is cutting people while it posts.
- The wider economy: all of August's hiring rebound came from a 46,000 increase in state and local government hiring. Private-sector hiring edged down 1,000.
So "hiring" overstates it. Finance is opening requisitions much faster than it fills them, and that changes how you should write the resume.
Why are finance openings rising while hires fall?
Openings pile up when requisitions stay open instead of turning into offers. The likely reasons are slow approvals, multiple review rounds, and managers holding out for an exact match. That's selectivity. It isn't a shortage that a general "transferable skills" pitch can fill.
Openings per hire is the number of open postings divided by hires in the same month. The higher it is, the harder it is to turn any one posting into an offer. Finance's ratio almost doubled in a year, from 1.77 to 3.21.
Up from 1.77 a year earlier. Only federal government, at 4.35, was higher.
Information came in third at 2.80. So the two sectors tech workers know best are both near the top of the list for postings that don't turn into hires.
The openings sit at the slowest employers
Employer size explains a lot of the gap. Across the economy, employers with 5,000 or more staff posted 2.96 openings per hire. Employers with 50 to 249 staff posted 1.14. Big banks and insurers are where the openings pile up, and they're also the employers running ATS filters and multi-round approvals.
That matters for resume strategy. Exact keyword alignment counts most at the large employers, which is also where most of the openings are. A resume that a hiring manager would understand with a little translation still fails if the ATS (applicant tracking system, the software that parses and ranks applications) never sends it to that manager.
Is tech hiring any better than finance right now?
No. The information sector now hires at a 1.6% rate. That's below finance's 1.7%, and information openings fell about 13% over the year. Moving from tech to fintech makes sense because tech is hiring even less, not because finance is easy to get into.
| Metric | Finance & insurance | Information |
|---|---|---|
| Openings, Aug 2025 → Aug 2026 | 242K → 353K (+45.9%) | 141K → 123K (-12.8%) |
| Openings rate | 3.5% → 5.0% | 4.7% → 4.3% |
| Hires rate | 2.0% → 1.7% | 2.4% → 1.6% |
| Openings per hire | 1.77 → 3.21 | 2.04 → 2.80 |
You may have read that the information sector's openings rate "halved." That comes from July data, when the rate fell sharply (BLS now puts July at 2.8%). August came back to 4.3%. That's still below a year ago, but nowhere near half. The hires rate is the more useful number, and it's lower in tech than in finance.
That's the context for October's cuts. HubSpot is cutting about 660 people, 7% of its workforce, and CEO Yamini Rangan said the cuts were "not driven by AI-related efficiencies." Netflix's cuts mostly landed on product, tech, legal, and HR teams. Workday is cutting 525 people, or 2.5%. At Airtable, Bending Spoons' Federico Simionato pointed to a "deep belief that small teams ship more and better." Across 2026, TrueUp counts 652 tech layoffs affecting 194,600 people. If you're one of them and you're looking at banks, the rest of this is for you.
Who are you competing with for finance analyst roles?
You're competing with a big group of analysts who already work in finance. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, 31,363 US profiles titled Data Analyst, Business Analyst, or Data Scientist sit at financial services, banking, and insurance firms. The comparable count at software, IT services, and internet firms is 36,169.
About 87% the size of the matching pool at software, IT, and internet firms.
Keep that 87% in mind. Finance isn't a small field waiting for tech people to arrive. It already has an analytics workforce almost as big as tech's, and those people already use the domain vocabulary the postings are written in.
Business Analyst is the title that gets you in
In a top-25 sample from Refolk's index (directional, not a census), Business Analyst is the most common analytics title in finance, at 10 of 25. Data Scientist leads in tech, at 8 of 25. Capital One is the finance employer that shows up most, along with Bank of America, Bottomline, Unchained, Arc, and credit unions.
The reason is structural. Banks put analytics inside business lines like risk, payments, and FP&A (financial planning and analysis), so the titles carry the name of the business. In tech, someone doing modeling work is more often titled Data Scientist. At a bank, the person doing the same work may be a "Business Analyst, Credit Risk." If you only search "Data Scientist," you'll miss most of the openings that fit you.
How do you rewrite a tech resume for a finance posting?
Write it as an exact match for the posting, not as a pivot story. Use the posting's title, its domain nouns, and its regulatory context, and rename each project by the business outcome a bank would measure. That's the whole job of a tech-to-finance resume: show the reviewer you already did the work, in their words.
Here's the order to work in:
- Match the title. If the posting says "Business Analyst, Payments" and your work honestly fits, your headline says that. Don't write "Data Scientist exploring fintech."
- Name projects by finance outcomes. Banks measure loss rates, fraud, reconciliation, and compliance. Find the place where your past work touched one of them and lead the bullet with it.
- Translate tech nouns into domain nouns, but only where it's true. A billing pipeline is payments infrastructure. Audit logging is a control.
- Include the controls. Access controls, audit trails, data lineage, and review steps barely register on a SaaS resume. In a bank posting they're qualifications.
- Remove the transition paragraph. A summary that says you're "excited to bring tech skills to finance" tells the reviewer you're a risk.
- Tailor every application. Employers with 5,000+ staff run about 2.96 openings per hire and filter by keyword, so one generic finance version will miss each specific posting.
A quick before and after, for an engineer whose work really did involve payment events:
- Before: Built a Python pipeline for anomaly detection across product event data.
- After: Built a Python anomaly-detection pipeline over payment events that routed suspect transactions to manual review, with a full audit trail.
The work is the same in both. The second version uses the nouns a fraud or payments hiring manager screens for. If your anomaly detection ran on clickstream data, don't call it transactions. Find a different bullet that honestly touches money movement.
Doing this for every posting is slow. It's the work Refolk takes off your plate: it builds the resume from your own history, then rewrites it for each posting you paste in. The domain language comes from the posting, and the facts stay yours.
Finance is not short of people. It is short of exact matches, and your resume has to be one.
Should tech workers target senior or entry-level finance roles?
Go for the senior roles and the AI roles. Revelio Labs reports that junior roles at US banks are now 4.7% below their October 2022 level, while banks keep adding senior and tech roles. Draup counted 139,819 AI-related vacancies at institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Capital One, 49% more than in 2025.
That puts a laid-off mid-career engineer in a better position than a new graduate. Banks are cutting junior roles and adding the kind of experience you already have. Lloyds Banking Group alone is recruiting almost 300 people for agentic AI roles.
What that means for the resume:
- Lead with production systems. Put the AI or data system you shipped and ran at the top. Prototypes and courses go lower.
- Show scale and reliability. Say how long the system ran in production and what it handled, not just that you built it.
- Don't apply down a level to get in. Junior roles are the ones shrinking, so stepping down doesn't make you a safer pick.
- Make governance visible. If your system had human review, monitoring, or rollback, say so. In a regulated sector those details count as experience.
Where should you apply first, and what will Nov 3 tell you?
Split your applications between large banks, where most of the openings sit and your resume has to match tightly, and smaller employers, which across the economy ran about 1.14 openings per hire at 50 to 249 staff. Then check the November 3 JOLTS release to see whether finance hires are starting to catch up with openings.
A practical split:
- Large banks (Capital One, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase): most of the openings and the slowest process. Apply only where you can match the posting closely, and expect several rounds.
- Fintechs (Bottomline, Unchained, Arc): they show up on the finance side of Refolk's index sample, and their product work is closer to what you did in tech.
- Credit unions: they appear throughout the finance side of Refolk's index. Search for them by name instead of only chasing the big bank brands.
Don't apply to everything. At 3.21 openings per hire, many postings won't turn into an offer for anyone soon. Put your effort where you actually fit. Refolk scores how well your real history matches each posting before you apply, so you can drop the long shots and spend the time on the roles you can win.
The next JOLTS release is November 3, 2026, at 10:00 am ET. Look at one number: finance and insurance hires. If they move up toward the openings, the backlog is starting to clear and broader applications will pay off. If hires stay near 110,000 while openings keep climbing, the sector is still holding out for exact matches, and per-posting tailoring stays mandatory.
FAQ
Is finance hiring tech workers in 2026?
Finance and insurance is posting heavily (353,000 openings in August 2026) but hiring less than a year ago, at a 1.7% hires rate. That's still slightly above the information sector's 1.6%, so tech workers have a real opening. The roles that convert tend to be senior, AI-related, or embedded in business lines like risk and payments, not entry-level.
Should I call myself a career changer on a finance resume?
No. When a sector has 3.21 openings per hire, reviewers are screening for exact matches, and a "career changer" summary reads as risk. Lead with the production systems you shipped and describe them in the posting's domain language (fraud, reconciliation, loss rates, compliance). Your history will show the move without a paragraph explaining it.
How is a data analyst resume for banking different from one for tech?
A banking resume names the business line and the controls. Tech resumes usually lead with tools and model types. Bank postings are often titled "Business Analyst" plus a domain like credit risk or payments, so your bullets should name financial outcomes and mention audit trails, access controls, and review steps wherever they were part of the work.
When is the next JOLTS release, and why does it matter?
The next JOLTS release is November 3, 2026, at 10:00 am ET. Watch whether finance and insurance hires rise from about 110,000. If they do, the backlog of open requisitions is starting to convert into offers. If they don't, finance is still hiring selectively and close tailoring to each posting still matters.