Talent acquisition feels bad in 2025. Experienced TA leaders are “open to work”, recruiting teams are shrinking, and more broadly large parts of white-collar hiring seem frozen.

We in the TA profession have been living in this reality for over two years now.

Demand for talent acquisition professionals is facing pressure from three big changes: the hangover from COVID-era excesses, the general business environment’s renewed focus on efficiency, and the emerging structural shift driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Together, these forces are creating a perfect storm.

The COVID hangover

During the COVID-era, recruiters were in such high demand that there were more jobs available on LinkedIn for recruiters in tech than there were for software engineers.

Sound too good to be true? It was.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) groups talent acquisition professionals in their Human Resource Specialists category. The category includes other jobs in HR too, but it’s the closest proxy that we have for employment in talent acquisition employment, especially because there are separate categories for HR Managers, Training & Development, and Compensation & Benefits employment.

The BLS began tracking HR Specialists in 2012. Until 2019, the profession grew steadily and predictably as the economy grew and the labor market tightened. That steady rate of growth is the red dotted line in the chart below.

In the era  of the Great Resignation from 2020 to 2023, the ranks of Human Resource Specialists exploded by over 248,000 people. That point where the blue line diverges from the red and starts going up? That’s a lot more recruiters entering the profession in those years.

This far outpaced overall workforce growth – in 2020, 466 out of every 100,000 workers was an HR Specialist. By 2023, that number had grown to 590.

That was unsustainable, and in 2024 it slowed to a crawl, growing more slowly than it has in any year since the BLS started tracking the category.

Big numbers tend to regress to the mean, and right now we are way above the historical trendline for employment in talent acquisition.

The “year of efficiency”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” – and the company’s financial results – caught the attention of CEOs everywhere, and two years later companies in all industries continue to reduce headcount and slow hiring, leading to fears of a “frozen” labor market and decreased demand for recruiters.

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