It’s Q2. Are You Still Hiring for the Plan You Wrote in January?
3.5 minute read | A midyear workforce audit for leaders
The hiring plan you submitted in January was probably reasonable when you wrote it. Headcount targets penciled out. Roles were defined. Compensation bands looked competitive. Recruiting pipelines were already running.
Then the year happened.
AI capability jumped again. The entry-level labor market collapsed — unemployment for new graduates peaked at 13.3 percent last July, the worst entry-level market in nearly four decades. Companies cut a combined 1.17 million jobs in the past twelve months. Two-thirds of employers paused hiring at some point to figure out where AI could fill the gap.
Whatever workforce assumptions you carried into January, mid-year is when reality has caught up to the plan. The question is whether your plan has caught up to reality.
What changed between January and now
|
January 2026 We need 12 more analysts to handle the volume. |
June 2026 Half that volume is being absorbed by AI. The question is which six we actually need — and what level of judgment we need from them. |
|
January 2026 We’ll hire from the usual pipelines. |
June 2026 The usual pipelines are flooded with AI-assisted applications. Your filters from last year don’t work the same way. |
|
January 2026 Comp bands are set through year-end. |
June 2026 Some roles softened. Others — especially anything requiring senior judgment — got more expensive, not less. |
|
January 2026 We’ll backfill departures as they happen. |
June 2026 Some of those departures are an opportunity to restructure the role, not replace it. |
The four-question midyear audit
Before Q3 begins, every workforce plan deserves an honest pass through these four questions. They take about an hour. They surface most of what you need to know.
QUESTION 1 Has the work itself changed since January?
Roles have shifted faster this year than most plans assumed. The accounts payable clerk role looks different than it did six months ago. So does the marketing analyst, the customer service lead, and the junior developer. If you’re hiring the same role you were hiring in January, you may be hiring for work that does not exist in the same form anymore.
QUESTION 2 Are you recruiting from the same pool — and is it still the right one?
Most companies have not updated their sourcing strategy this year, even as the candidate pool has fundamentally changed. AI-assisted applications have surged. The signal-to-noise ratio in your applicant tracking system is different than it was in Q1. The people you want to talk to may not be applying through the same channels.
QUESTION 3 Is your compensation calibrated to January’s market or June’s?
The labor market in June 2026 is bifurcated. Some roles have softened considerably as AI absorbs execution. Others — senior judgment roles, specialized technical leads, anyone managing ambiguity — have become harder and more expensive to hire. A single comp band across the year ignores both.
QUESTION 4 Who do you already have, and are you using them well?
Mid-year is the natural moment to look inside before looking outside. Are there strong performers stuck in roles below their capacity? Are there teams holding institutional knowledge you would have to pay six figures to replicate externally? The cheapest hire in Q3 is often the internal redeployment you already had the budget for.
Your Q3 reset checklist
- Pull the original January hiring plan and read it like an outsider — what assumptions no longer hold?
- Re-baseline three roles you’re actively recruiting against current market data, not Q4 2025 data.
- Identify one role you were planning to hire that could be restructured instead of filled.
- Audit your top 10 percent of current employees — are any of them ready for a stretch you have not yet offered?
- Decide which Q1 hiring assumptions get carried into Q3, and which get retired.
The companies that quietly outperform in the back half of any year are not the ones that grind hardest against their original plan. They are the ones that update the plan honestly when the data tells them to.
Ready to talk about what’s working?
At Exact Staff, we partner with hundreds of companies across dozens of industries, giving us a real-time view of which workforce strategies are succeeding in today’s market — and which aren’t. Let’s meet to discuss the practical solutions we’re seeing work across our client base, and explore how to address the workforce challenges and opportunities your business is facing right now.
Contact your Exact Staff Representative to schedule a consultation.
Posted by Exact Staff
