When hirers get fired – laid-off tech recruiters face a tough job market

WHEN payments firm Stripe laid off 14 per cent of its headcount last November, in-house recruiter Jane* was one of those affected.

The 30-year-old was able to land another similar role within a month, but thinks that those laid off more recently are having a harder time.

“I feel like right now when you hear of another round of layoffs, people are more blase and less likely to quickly offer support,” Jane tells The Business Times.

Tech recruiters are feeling the pain of a weakening job market, as layoffs mount and companies freeze hiring. Besides Stripe’s retrenchment exercise, a long list of tech firms have slashed their workforce in Singapore, including Amazon, Meta, Google and Sea. Startups have similarly shed staff and tightened hiring budgets, as venture capital dries up.

All of this has had an outsized impact on the job market for recruiters. As a rough gauge, in a live spreadsheet listing laid-off tech workers in Singapore, close to 70 out of over 270 individuals – about 25 per cent – were in recruitment or human resources (HR) roles.

“With restructuring, downsizing and reduction in hiring, the first to go will be the talent acquisition folks,” said Elena Chow, founder of talent solutions company ConnectOne. HR teams are also being downsized at the same time, making it difficult for recruiters who want to move into adjacent talent management roles.

“Generally, the recruitment pipeline is down 30 to 50 per cent for job boards and recruitment firms in tech, including ours. That’s a very significant number and obviously companies cannot retain the talent acquisition team with this kind of drop,” Chow noted.

Some recruiters, especially more senior ones, have taken to starting their own recruitment businesses just to “tahan”, or endure, the tough times.

Said Chow: “They rely on some of their past contacts. As a one-person show, you don’t need to hit humongous targets; you can just do one role (placement) a month and still make a decent salary.”

External recruiters are typically able to earn fees from recommending the initial pool of candidates that are suitable for the job. If a candidate is hired and passes probation, the recruiter can also earn a percentage of the candidate’s annual salary.

Jane has observed a similar trend of in-house recruiters striking it out on their own. While she and some former colleagues were able to get re-employed quickly, the more senior ones had difficulty finding job openings, and decided to start their own consultancies.

A few laid-off recruiters have managed to make career shifts to other functions, such as operations and business development. However, such instances remain rare, added Chow.

Some have also pivoted to tech sales or customer success roles, said Jeremy Tan, who heads the Singapore tech recruitment team at tech jobs portal NodeFlair.

The time taken for laid-off recruiters to find new work varies. Those who are willing to take cuts or sacrifices to job titles are typically able to land their next job under 90 days, said Tan.

Jane notes that some recruiters laid off from big tech are even willing to take a 50 per cent pay cut, and three to six month contracts, just to tide things through. Some are also looking beyond big tech to join startups and SMEs.

Meanwhile, the worsening job market has also hit tech companies that focus on recruitment. On Monday (May 8), career social networking site LinkedIn announced that it would cut over 700 roles. In March, over 200 Singapore employees were retrenched from jobs site Indeed, as the company slashed 15 per cent of its global workforce.

Uncertain outlook

The outlook for tech recruiters is hazy, as their prospects very much depend on recovery in the broader tech jobs market.

Sentiment is still gloomy for now. Akshay Mendon, client partner at executive search company EMA Partners, noted that the tech jobs market has not been able to quickly soak up those impacted by layoffs.

“(There is) still a large number of impacted folks are looking for jobs. We have seen scenarios where people laid off by Big Tech have gone through 20 to 30 separate interviews and have still not landed something,” he said.

Mendon also observed that the employment narrative has flipped a little. Candidates in technical fields, such as engineering, are in high supply. However, the demand for them is now relatively lower, as companies are no longer in expansion mode.

That said, there is still some activity. “Roles closer to the customer for example – commercial sales, product management, marketing and customer experience roles – are still in demand as companies look to maximise sales,” he said.

Adrian Goh, co-founder of NodeFlair, expects that demand for AI-related roles is also set to rise, given the recent exuberance over the technology. But that aside, the outlook for the tech jobs market is uncertain in the next 12 months, with hiring freezes expected to continue.

Mendon echoes that sentiment, noting that hiring freezes are spreading beyond tech as well. “Companies will buckle down till demand normalises,” he said.

*Name changed for anonymity