An Ultra-Competitive Tech Market, and why Hiring Won’t Slow Down

The Hiring Freeze

As worries over a Great Recession have increased, rumors of a “Hiring Freeze”, primarily affecting all facets of the tech industry, have increased alongside them - yet job openings are more abundant than ever.

“This really doesn’t look like a labor market that’s about to tip into recession,”

There are 11.4 million open jobs nationwide, LinkedIn returns over 75,000 open job results for “Account Executive” alone, and thousands of software and tech companies continue to see a need for rapid growth. As Daniel Zhao of Glassdoor puts it, “this really doesn’t look like a labor market that’s about to tip into recession.”

In fact, the biggest issue facing sales leaders now is not whether to hire, but how to get candidates in the door quickly enough to meet the demand for growth. With an extremely tight labor market, candidates have had far more room for choosiness than in the pre-pandemic market. Thus, the hiring process has become slower and far more costly for teams in hypergrowth, as evidenced by an increase in budget for hiring. “54% of businesses who received private equity (PE) or venture capital (VC) funding in the past 12 months invested in recruitment,” cites OnRec, looking at recent trends in tech hiring.

Difficulties in Hiring

For the majority of tech companies, the mass layoffs at the start of the pandemic came back to bite - leaving difficult gaps and tremendous amounts of lost revenue as demand picked back up far before pre-pandemic team size could be restored. For hiring managers still using open job boards or other open market hiring platforms, this problem persists.

Even the gloomiest of economic forecasts predict joblessness will remain “quite low”.

Even the gloomiest of economic forecasts predict joblessness will remain “quite low”, per The Conference Board, which means hiring efforts are more crucial than ever.