After a years-long rush to find talent, hiring has been pushed to back burner, according to data from HR Dive’s Identity of HR 2024 survey.

2024’s rocky start may have been one of the first signals that the market was in for a change. Big-name tech companies including Snap, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all announced massive waves of layoffs, prompting widespread concern that the long-rumored recession may be around the corner.

The job market stabilized, however, and experts told HR Dive at the time that those layoffs were largely a righting of a ship made wobbly by years of extensive overhiring in tech fields, particularly in response to the pandemic.

But HR folks — caught in the mire of shifting priorities — say they now face not only tighter budgets but higher expectations for maximizing those dollars

In last year’s Identity of HR survey, 24% of survey respondents, a plurality, said hiring was their top priority, followed closely by culture. In this year’s survey, hiring dropped to third place on the list, beaten out by “maximizing value within budgetary constraints,” the answer cited by 26% of the 490 respondents surveyed. Culture was once again in second place at 22%.

As the pendulum swings back to something more like normalcy, “it might feel like a step back,” Jonathan Gove, senior executive advisor at Eagle Hill Consulting, told HR Dive. But now employers — for the first time in years — may finally feel like they have the right people in place, just in time for HR to focus intently on value.

An imbalance righting itself

Budget patterns were tied to this imbalance, according to Hanne Nieberg, director analyst within Gartner’s HR Practice.

HR budgets saw a more than 60% increase in 2020, right before COVID-19 hit, according to Gartner data. Once the pandemic struck, budgets locked down enormously to adjust for uncertainty. By 2022, spending had increased, only for the “triple squeeze” of supply chain constraints, labor shortages and inflation to hamstring budgets all over again in 2023.

Only 40% of leaders surveyed by Gartner said they aim to increase their budgets for 2024, while 30% said budgets would hold steady and 30% said they would be decrease, Nieberg said. Notably, staffing and recruiting dropped from second place priority in investment to seventh.

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