In November 2024 we published Anticipating Job Market Growth by 2025. It said hiring could start to pick up from the second quarter of 2025 and pointed to anticipations of a "robust jobs market" by the third, because the caution created by the U.S. presidential election was about to lift. The evidence was one ManpowerGroup figure, that an estimated 25% of the global workforce expected layoffs within six months, and the comments of Rajesh Namboothiry, SVP at Manpower US.
Our verdict on that piece: it was partly right, and the part it got right was the least useful part. Hiring intentions did strengthen, eventually. The timing was about a year early, and the explanation it offered (election uncertainty froze hiring, post-election clarity would release it) was never tested and did not survive 2025.
A caveat on how we are grading ourselves. We are measuring the forecast against ManpowerGroup's Employment Outlook Survey, which records employers' hiring intentions rather than hires actually made, and we have not reviewed government hiring and layoff data for this piece. That limits what we can say about the wider labor market. It is still a fair test of the forecast: if the company whose executive made the call cannot find the rebound in its own survey, the rebound did not arrive on schedule.
The quarter we picked was flat
ManpowerGroup's Q2 2025 release, based on nearly 40,000 employers across 41 countries surveyed in January 2025, put the global Net Employment Outlook at 25%, holding steady for the third consecutive quarter. Forty percent of employers expected to increase hiring, 15% expected to cut and 42% planned to hold. The U.S. outlook was 34%, and the global figure was up three points year over year. That is a stable market, with no sign of the upturn we had scheduled for that quarter.
The Q3 2025 survey, covering over 40,600 employers in 42 countries in April 2025, was worse for us. The global outlook fell to +24%, and the share of employers anticipating cuts rose to 16%. Chair and CEO Jonas Prising explained the dip plainly: "Trade uncertainty added to already cooling labor markets, prompting some companies to pause or slow hiring plans." The quarter we said would be strong was the quarter hiring intentions slipped.
Prising's sentence also damages the mechanism we leaned on. Our piece attributed the late-2024 pause to the election and never weighed it against interest rates, sector slowdowns or cost pressure. His words "already cooling labor markets" point to a slowdown that was under way before the trade shock, a cause our piece gestured at as general "economic challenges" but never weighed against the election. The end of the election may well have removed one source of hesitation, but trade uncertainty soon produced another, and employers in Manpower's own survey said so. A forecast that treats a political event as an on-off switch will mistake the end of one uncertainty for the end of uncertainty.
The quarter we said would be strong was the quarter hiring intentions slipped.
The 2026 numbers are real, and they are the best case for our old piece. ManpowerGroup's Q2 2026 release shows 45% of organizations planning to add staff and 13% expecting reductions, with the U.S. outlook at 38%. The share of employers unsure fell to 2% from 4% the previous quarter, which the company read as uncertainty beginning to ease. Had we written that hiring intentions would strengthen within two years, we would claim the win.
We named quarters, though, and timing was the claim. A head of talent who opened requisitions in the second quarter of 2025 on the strength of that forecast was hiring into a flat market, with trade uncertainty about to push intentions lower. The "reasonable reading" defence is also weaker than it looks: a reasonable reading in November 2024 would have stated its conditions and its odds, and ours offered neither. Being right about direction with a year of slack is a low bar. Most cyclical forecasts are eventually right about direction, which is why direction alone earns so little credit.
What a hiring forecast owes the people who use it
The deeper fault was in how the original was built. One survey figure and one executive's outlook were presented as a forecast, with no confidence levels and no indicators that would confirm or refute it. The piece was also careless in ways that should have prompted a second look: it described the incoming administration as led by a former president, and it said cautious hiring would persist through 2024 in an article about 2025. Namboothiry works for a staffing company, which has every commercial reason to see a hiring recovery around the corner. His read may still have been sound, but it needed a second source, and we did not supply one.
For talent leaders, the lesson is about what to take from an external forecast. The date is rarely the usable part; the conditions and signals behind it are. Watch the share of employers planning cuts, which edged from 15% to 16% in 2025, and the share who cannot say, which dropped to 2% in early 2026. We would expect those to move before headcount does, and a workforce plan can be keyed to them. A plan keyed to a calendar quarter from a single vendor's executive will be wrong in exactly the way ours was.
Most cyclical forecasts are eventually right about direction, which is why direction alone earns so little credit.
So the verdict is right direction, wrong year, wrong reason, and the third error is the one that matters. A forecast that arrives early for the right reasons still teaches readers what to watch; one that arrives early for the wrong reason teaches them to watch the wrong thing. We told readers to watch the election. What the company we quoted blamed when 2025 hiring intentions slipped was a labor market that was already cooling, and then trade.
