By Chip Cutter
The corporate playbook for next year? Don't hire.
Companies are looking to stay lean into 2026 while relying on technology to take on more tasks. Forecasters at jobs site Indeed expect relatively minimal hiring growth in 2026 and e-commerce platform Shopify and Chime Financial are already vowing to keep the size of their employee bases roughly flat.
At a gathering of CEOs in Midtown Manhattan this month organized by the Yale School of Management, 66% of leaders surveyed said they planned to either fire workers or maintain the size of their existing teams next year. Only a third indicated they planned to hire.
"You're going to see a lot of wait and see," said Chris Layden, chief executive of staffing company Kelly Services. "Some of the looming uncertainty will mean that we're going to continue to see an investment in capital over people."
Companies haven't been in the hiring mood for months. The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November, its highest in four years. While the U.S. added jobs in fields such as healthcare and education in 2025, signs are growing that the white-collar labor market is now seizing up. A range of prominent employers such as Amazon.com, Verizon, Target and United Parcel Service have cut white-collar roles in recent months, adding to the unease among workers.
The reluctance to add staff reflects concerns about the economy, along with the belief that artificial intelligence could handle more work inside major companies. Other employers hired too many people after the pandemic and are still correcting for that.
"We're close to zero job growth. That's not a healthy labor market," Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said at the Yale summit. "When I go around and talk to CEOs around the country, everybody's telling me, 'Look, we're not hiring because we're waiting to try to figure out what happens with AI. What jobs can we replace? What jobs do we don't?'"
The pause in hiring could be temporary if companies decide they do require more people to meet their growth goals. But the mood now, Waller said, is that companies simply don't need any extra labor.
"Everybody's afraid for their jobs. I'm dead serious," said Waller, a candidate to become the next chair of the Federal Reserve.
This environment means many employees are clinging to their jobs. At International Business Machines, employees are leaving the technology giant at the lowest rate in 30 years, CEO Arvind Krishna said. In the U.S., voluntary attrition at IBM is now under 2%, a decline from the typical 7%.
"People aren't looking to change jobs," Krishna said. "That then leads to less hiring because people aren't leaving."
At a conference recently, a top executive at Shopify was asked to describe the company's hiring plans and he gave an increasingly common answer. "I don't see us next year needing to increase head count in any way," Chief Financial Officer Jeff Hoffmeister said. "It has been over two years we've been at this head count. As I look to next year, I think we can continue to be disciplined on head count."
At Wells Fargo, CEO Charlie Scharf said this month the bank expected to have fewer people as it heads into next year. The company's workforce has fallen from roughly 275,000 people in 2019 to about 210,000 today as executives have cut costs and overhauled the bank.
Scharf said he expects AI's impact on staffing levels to be "extremely significant," though it could take years to play out. He said many executives have been afraid to lay out the damage that AI could do to the job market. "No one wants to stand up and say that we should have -- we're going to have lower head count in the future," Scharf said. " It's a difficult thing to say."
Wells Fargo will continue to retrain its workforce and use "attrition as our friend," he said, but change is clear. "It's not going to totally replace humans, but it does create an opportunity to do things significantly different," he said.
Economists at Indeed recently updated hiring scenarios for the year ahead, expecting more of the same. Analyzing job openings along with estimates for economic growth, they now predict the unemployment rate to hover around 4.6% in 2026. "We're not expecting things to change a whole lot in 2026," said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed.
Some of the weakest industries for new job openings include those in well-paid fields such as data analytics, software development, marketing and entertainment, she said. Job postings are stronger in industries such as healthcare and construction.
Though there has been a pullback in white-collar employment, Ullrich said the current dynamics may eventually need to change. If the economy expands next year, some employers may decide they need to hire more people to grow.
"You can't have this low-hire, low-fire (environment) with growing GDP for too long," she said. "At some point, something has to shift."
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 27, 2025 21:00 ET (02:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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