The Spring Hiring Rebound Is Gone, and Your Hiring Timeline Needs to Catch Up
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ADP Research published its weekly NER Pulse this morning, and the number says hiring has been sliding for a month straight. For the four weeks ending July 4, private employers added an average of 16,500 jobs a week, the weakest reading since mid-March and the fourth straight weekly slowdown, according to ADP’s own release.
Context is what makes 16,500 worth stopping on. I flagged the June 6 reading of 30,750 a few weeks back as a possible bounce off the spring floor, worth watching rather than trusting. It wasn’t a floor. The four-week average fell to 24,250 the next week, then 21,000, then 19,250, and now 16,500, a straight four-week decline that continues right through today’s release.
Zoom out further, and the round trip is the real story. This same tracker had employers adding 40,750 jobs a week on May 2. Less than three months later, that number is under half. ADP’s own data shows the slide wasn’t perfectly smooth (there was a small uptick in early June before the drop resumed), but the direction since the spring peak has been consistently down.
The Pulse is still a young series, and its own history says a reading this low isn’t automatically alarming. ADP launched it in late October 2025, and its first weeks actually showed employers cutting jobs, roughly 11,250 lost per week for the four weeks ending October 25, before bottoming near 4,750 lost per week that November. It sagged again over the winter, down to roughly 9,000 a week by late February, before climbing back to 15,250 by mid-March and then into the spring rebound. Today’s 16,500 puts hiring almost exactly back where it sat during that late-winter soft patch.
This history is why I’d call the current reading weak rather than alarming. The Pulse has read lower twice since launch, once into negative territory. What matters here is the speed, not the level. Going from 40,750 to 16,500 in nine weeks, on the same tracker using the same method, is a fast unwind of an entire season’s hiring gains.
On the ground, that speed shows up as hesitation, not layoffs. Companies aren’t cutting staff en masse right now. They’re slow to commit to the next hire. A requisition that would have cleared approval in three weeks last spring is taking twice that now, because everyone up the chain wants one more look before signing off. This kind of stalling shows up in a soft weekly hiring number well before it ever shows up as a job cut.
If you’re planning headcount for the second half of the year and want a second read on what the market’s actually doing before you commit to a timeline, our staffing team tracks this daily.
AI Adoption Jumped 6 Points, and the Workers Skipping It Are Most Exposed
Gallup’s latest workforce data shows AI use at work crossing into the mainstream fast. 47% of US employees now say their organization has integrated AI tools to improve productivity, up from 41% just one quarter earlier, a six-point jump in three months.
Individual use is further along still. 52% of US workers now use AI in their role, more than half. 30% use it frequently, a few times a week or more, and 15% use it daily. The climb has been steep: 21% of workers used AI at all in 2023, 40% by mid-2025, and 52% now.
Most of that use is still basic. Among AI users, the top applications are writing and editing (51%), search or research (49%), and general problem-solving (39%). Coding assistance and automation trail well behind, each cited by just 16% of AI users.
Two patterns stand out underneath the topline number. Frequent users don’t just use AI more often. They use it across more of their job, including the technical tasks occasional users rarely touch. And the payoff scales with breadth: 90% of workers using AI for seven or more purposes call the effect on their productivity positive, against 45% for workers using it for just one or two.
Andy Kemp, the Gallup researcher behind the report, put the implication plainly: “Access may help employees get started, but the next stage of artificial intelligence in business will likely depend on helping them apply AI more specifically, consistently and practically in the work they do.”
This growing split is the part employers should sit with. On one side are workers pulling AI into coding, analysis, and automation, the parts of a job with the biggest effect on output. On the other are people using it as a fancier spell-checker, or not touching it at all. Gallup’s own reporting from last month found workers who rarely use AI look more exposed when companies cut headcount. Same job title, very different exposure, depending on how someone actually works.
The 1 in 5 employees who still don’t know whether their own company has adopted AI is the detail I’d flag hardest for leadership. If your own people can’t say whether the organization has an AI strategy, you don’t have one they can act on, regardless of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.
For anyone hiring, “can this person work with AI, and across how many parts of the job” is turning into a real screening question, not a nice-to-have. The wider AI displacement debate is still unsettled on timing and scale, but this data is clear on one point already: the workers building AI fluency across more of their work are the ones showing up on the safer side of that debate. For workers, the practical move is just as clear. Get past writing and search, and see what roles are actually rewarding that broader skill set right now.
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Workers Trust Their Own Skills More Than They Trust the Economy Around Them
SHRM released its Q2 2026 Global Employee Monitor on July 20, and the headline finding is a split screen: workers feel good about their own jobs and their own skills, and worse about the economy surrounding them.
Pay remains the single biggest factor in whether someone takes a job, stays, or leaves, according to the survey. Benefits, job security, career advancement, and work-life balance round out the list of top priorities. Growth and purpose are what keep people engaged day to day. Compensation, job security, culture, and leadership are what actually keep them from quitting.
Confidence is strongest wherever it’s personal. 70% of workers say they’re highly confident their current skills would be valuable to another employer. More than six in 10 say they’re more inclined to stay with their current employer than to leave it. AI use keeps climbing in this survey too; generative AI is still the most common form, and worker anxiety about AI eliminating jobs held low and steady even as adoption grew.
The soft spot is everything outside the workplace. Positive views of economic conditions, the job market, and the cost of living all slipped from Q1. People feel more comfortable inside their own building than about the world outside it.
James Atkinson, SHRM’s vice president of thought leadership, framed the gap directly: “One of the clearest patterns in this quarter’s findings is the widening gap between how workers view the broader economy and how they view their own workplaces. While concerns about economic conditions became more pronounced, workers’ confidence in their organizations, their skills, and their ability to adapt remained remarkably consistent.”
The gap itself is the useful part, not either number alone. People tend to rate what they can see up close, their own job and their own manager, higher than the big abstract picture, so some of this tracks with ordinary human nature. What’s worth watching is how wide that gap has grown.
For employers, the retention number is the practical takeaway, and it lines up with the hiring slowdown in the first story on this page. The more than six in 10 workers leaning toward staying mostly reflects a market where fewer people feel confident they can do better elsewhere right now. When hiring cools the way ADP’s data shows it has, fewer workers roll the dice on a jump. Retention looks strong on paper, but a real chunk of it is people sitting tight because the exits feel narrower than they did in the spring. When hiring picks back up, a share of that “inclined to stay” sentiment tends to evaporate fast, and managers who read flat turnover as a solved problem usually get surprised by it.
The pay finding never seems to move, quarter after quarter, and it’s worth restating because plenty of employers still act surprised by it. I made a version of this same point a few weeks back using ZipRecruiter’s affordability data, and this survey confirms it again from a different angle: if your comp sits off market, no amount of culture messaging closes that gap on its own.
