How to Get Hired at IBM in 2026

IBM is running two hiring stories at once. On one side, the company has cut thousands of US roles since late 2025, including replacing a couple hundred human resources jobs with AI agents. On the other, CEO Arvind Krishna has said IBM plans to triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, and the company overall headcount has grown even as specific back-office functions shrink. For an experienced professional, understanding this split matters more than any generic interview tip, because it tells you which parts of IBM are actually adding people right now.

What IBM Itself Says About Its Hiring Process

IBM publishes an Application Steps and Tips page describing what candidates should expect. According to IBM Careers (ibm.com), depending on the role, candidates may face a coding assessment measuring programming knowledge, a video assessment where you answer interview questions on webcam, and in some cases an English language assessment. IBM frames the process explicitly as a two-way evaluation, telling candidates directly that while IBM is interviewing you, you are also interviewing IBM, and encourages candidates to treat the interview as a conversation and to ask for feedback afterward (ibm.com). The page also points candidates toward a Talent Network and Job Alerts system so applicants can track openings that match their specific skills rather than searching generically, which is a useful signal that IBM recruiting itself is organized around skill-matching rather than broad title-based search. IBM also publishes dedicated resources titled How to Stand Out and Advice from IBM Recruiters, both aimed at helping candidates prepare role-specific material rather than a one-size-fits-all application, reinforcing that specificity is what IBM says it rewards at the screening stage.

The 2026 Reality: HR Automation, Layoffs, and a Hiring Pivot

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told the Wall Street Journal that the company used AI agents to replace the work of roughly 200 human resources employees, while simultaneously increasing hiring of programmers and salespeople, funded in part by those savings (wsj.com). Separately, Reuters reported via Yahoo Finance that IBM planned to cut a low single-digit percentage of its global workforce in the fourth quarter of 2025, following earlier 2025 cuts tied to a pivot toward higher-growth software and services, with IBM confirming the reduction would affect some US roles even as the company said total US employment would stay roughly flat (finance.yahoo.com). TheStreet reported that despite these ongoing cuts, IBM Chief Executive said in February 2026 that the company plans to triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, concentrated in customer engagement and AI management roles (thestreet.com). Krishna has separately said he could see up to 30 percent of IBM roughly 26,000 back-office, non-customer-facing roles affected by AI automation over a five-year horizon, a figure reported by Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com).

What This Means If You Are Targeting IBM Right Now

The practical takeaway is that IBM shrinking and IBM growing are two different parts of the same organization. Back-office, administrative, and legacy infrastructure roles, the same categories tied to the HR automation and the Q4 2025 cuts, are in a genuinely contracting environment. Customer-facing technical roles, sales, software engineering, and AI-adjacent positions are in the part of IBM that is actively expanding, consistent with Krishna own statement that total headcount has grown even through multiple rounds of targeted cuts (wsj.com). This is a meaningfully different picture than a company in broad retrenchment, but it means an application into a shrinking function is fighting for a shrinking number of seats, while an application into a growth function is competing in a genuinely expanding pool, and reading IBM own job postings for department and function context becomes essential before you invest time tailoring a resume. TheStreet reporting on the tripled entry-level hiring push specifically named customer engagement and AI management as the target categories, which gives experienced candidates a concrete starting point for where to look first rather than searching IBM broad careers site by title alone (thestreet.com).

Turning This Into a Targeted Application

Once you know which parts of IBM are contracting and which are the target of the stated entry-level and technical hiring push, the execution problem is the same one every experienced applicant faces: finding the specific open roles that sit inside the growth areas, and making sure your resume speaks directly to the skill match IBM own recruiters say they screen for during the coding and video assessment stages. This is where Standout is useful in a targeted way, not as a replacement for research but as the tool that turns research into an actual tailored application: helping you recognize which roles match your background against a company current hiring pattern, and adjusting your resume to reflect that specific reality rather than sending the same generic version to every IBM posting you find. Given how explicitly IBM has separated its contracting and growing functions in public statements, this is one of the clearer cases where a small amount of upfront research changes which roles are even worth applying to.