Nobody’s Getting Laid Off & Almost Nobody’s Getting Hired Either
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Employers announced 43,281 job cuts in September, down 18% from August and 20% from a year ago, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It’s the fewest September cuts since 2022. Andy Challenger, the firm’s workplace expert and chief revenue officer, put it plainly: “We’ve seen layoff activity subside over this year, and September continues to illustrate this point.”
The slowdown holds up across the year, too, with a catch. Companies have announced 573,195 cuts through September, down 39% from the same stretch of 2025. Strip out government cuts, which were unusually large last year, and the drop shrinks to 15%, from 646,671 to 550,185. The headline 39% figure is real, but most of it comes from comparing against an unusually high government-cuts year, not from private employers suddenly holding onto people they wouldn’t have a year ago.
Tech led every industry in September with 10,799 cuts and leads the full year with 165,925, up 54% from this point in 2025. Food companies announced 7,326 cuts in September, and non-profits announced 4,742.
The reason behind the cuts matters as much as the count. Market and economic conditions topped September’s list at 8,789 cuts, about 20%. AI ranked fifth for the month at 3,961, about 9%, but for the full year, AI is the single leading reason given, cited in 120,136 cuts, about 21% of everything announced in 2026. Employers have become comfortable naming AI publicly as a reason for cutting staff, whatever share of that credit the technology deserves over cost-cutting that would have happened anyway.
Hiring tells the harder half of this story. Employers announced plans to hire 90,787 workers in September, a jump from August’s 12,325 as seasonal hiring opened up, but down 23% from last September and the weakest September for hiring plans since 2011. Retail’s holiday staffing plans are the clearest signal here: Spirit Halloween and Michaels announced 62,000 combined seasonal hires, down from 100,800 a year ago, a 38% drop that points to retailers expecting a softer holiday season. Year-to-date hiring plans total 210,612, up 3% from 2025, almost entirely because cuts have also stayed low all year.
If you’re hiring seasonal workers this year, post those openings now. Fewer roles means less time for word to spread and for your best candidates to fill in elsewhere. If you’re looking for holiday work, apply early for the same reason: the pool of openings is smaller than it’s been in over a decade for this time of year.
When layoffs are this low and hiring plans are this weak at the same time, employed workers have every reason to stay put, and job seekers have little reason to expect a quick search. If your holiday staffing plan needs a boost before the season gets further along, explore our staffing services and tell us about your hiring needs.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
Reach out and see how we can help.
Jobless Claims Confirm What Challenger Just Showed You
The Department of Labor’s weekly claims report, out the same morning as Challenger’s data, tells the same story from the government’s side. First-time unemployment claims came in at 197,000 for the week ending September 26, down 1,000 from the week before. Looking back over the past year, only 2 weeks have come in lower: April 25 at 190,000 and July 18 at 189,000.
The 4-week average, which smooths out weekly noise, fell to 200,000, well below last year’s 234,000 average. Continuing claims, the number of people still collecting benefits, dropped 11,000 to 1,701,000, the lowest reading in this release’s 12-month table and 220,000 below a year ago. The insured unemployment rate held at 1.1%, down from 1.3% last year.
Continuing claims are the number I’d watch most closely here, and not because the direction looks good on its face. A falling number can mean people are finding new jobs, or it can mean they’ve used up their benefits and dropped out of the count entirely, and this report alone can’t tell you which one is happening. Tomorrow’s September jobs report should help settle that question.
California and Hawaii had the week’s biggest state-level increases, up 2,352 and 1,524 respectively, with neither state citing a specific reason. Former federal workers filed just 369 claims, down sharply from 530 a year ago, a sign that the wave of federal layoffs from earlier this year has mostly worked its way through the claims data.
Two separate government and private data sources agreeing on the same story (low layoffs, weak hiring) matters more than either one alone. If you manage a team right now, that combination means the people you already have are unlikely to leave voluntarily, which gives you room to be deliberate instead of reactive about who you add next.
Workday’s Second Layoff Round This Year Shows Where Tech Jobs Are Going
Workday disclosed in a September 29 SEC filing that it’s cutting about 2.5% of its workforce, roughly 525 of its 21,000 employees, concentrated in its Product and Technology team. The company is also giving up some leased office space. Total charges land between $65 million and $80 million, including $40 million to $55 million in cash for severance and related costs, with most of that, $55 million to $70 million, hitting the third quarter of fiscal 2027 and about $10 million more in the fourth quarter.
This is Workday’s second round of cuts this year. In February, the company cut 2% of its staff, mostly in Global Customer Operations. Both times, Workday has said it plans to keep hiring, this time “in key strategic areas and locations” throughout fiscal 2027, without naming which ones.
This missing detail is the part worth watching if you work in software. A company cutting one team while hiring for unnamed “strategic” ones twice in 8 months is reallocating headcount toward whatever it’s betting on next, not shrinking, and the filing gives employees no way to know whether their own role sits inside that bet or outside it.
Workday builds HR and finance software, so this story lands close to home for anyone managing a workforce with it. It’s also the same pattern Challenger’s report showed across all of tech this morning: companies are cutting specific teams while adding elsewhere, not cutting across the board, and they’re doing it more than once a year.
If your own organization is navigating a similar reshuffle, moving headcount out of one function and into another, talk to us about hiring for help building the team you’re trying to grow. And if a round like this one has put you back on the market, browse our open roles for positions where the growth is real, not just a line in an SEC filing.
