More U.S. Companies Plan to Slow Hiring in Second Half of 2025

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One in five U.S. employers surveyed by the Conference Board plans to slow hiring in the second half of 2025, nearly double the rate of companies that anticipated bringing on fewer people at this time last year.

The latest report from the research group, which has more than 1,000 public and private corporations as members, marks the second year in a row that many chief human resource officers polled were planning on fewer new hires. The last time executives were broadly optimistic about hiring was the second quarter of 2023, when more than half expected to increase head count, according to past Conference Board surveys.

Since then, optimism has steadily declined. Novo Nordisk, the company behind the blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, said Wednesday it would pause hiring in noncritical areas as it tries to fend off competition from knockoff versions of its medicines. Meta Platforms, which has been on a hiring blitz for AI workers, is pausing that effort. The staffing company GEE Group cited hiring freezes as a headwind to its business, and AMN Healthcare said hiring freezes at hospitals were slowing its physician-staffing business, according to the research firm AlphaSense.

Hiring managers are “taking a more thoughtful, steady approach as economic and policy uncertainty lingers,” said Diana Scott, leader of the Conference Board’s U.S. human-capital center. The survey of 100 chief human-resource officers includes U.S. organizations from Fortune 500 companies and large global brands as well as midsize regional employers and health systems that employ thousands of people.

Scott said the slowdown reflects companies’ efforts to be more strategic by strengthening existing teams and staying flexible before making big hiring moves as they did several years ago.

Paycom, an online payroll and HR-software company, told investors that as it rolls out more automation it is rethinking whether to backfill certain positions. Nexxen International, an advertising tech firm, said recently that it would hire fewer people in software development, even as it continues to onboard workers in other areas.

“Essentially, we’re trying to do more with the teams we have today,” Karim Rayes, Nexxen’s chief product officer, said.

The Conference Board report marks another sign of a weakening U.S. labor market. Job growth has decelerated this year, and major employers, including T. Rowe Price Group (TROW) and JetBlue Airways (JBLU), have hit the brakes on hiring to cut costs during an uncertain economic environment.

It now takes the average worker 24 weeks to find a job after losing one, nearly a month longer than a year ago, according to federal data. The July jobs report showed hiring slowing sharply. The number of long-term unemployed has been rising.

Some CEOs have been bragging to investors about their shrinking workforces and plans to be more productive with fewer employees. Union Pacific shrank staff by 3% while labor productivity for the rail operator reached a record quarterly high, executives said earlier this summer. Bank of America (BAC) has said it will bring on 2,000 early-career hires later this year, though it cut its staff by 1,500 people earlier in the year.

A perfect storm of changes this year has made business leaders cautious. Tariffs have weighed on manufacturing, among other sectors. Workplace raids have hurt immigrant-dependent industries such as landscaping and meatpacking. Those economic realities come on top of companies’ yearslong desire to embrace artificial intelligence to make their workforces more productive and efficient.

The Conference Board’s CHRO Confidence Index for hiring measured 54 in the second quarter, bringing down hiring expectations from an index of 59 in the same period last year.

The Conference Board has been asking HR executives a new set of questions this year about managing change. Half of those surveyed said they were investing in change-management training for leaders so they could better deal with uncertainty.

Half of those surveyed also said they expected the Trump administration’s policies to have a negative impact on the workforce, up from 36% who said the same thing in March. Meanwhile, 11% said administration policies would have a positive impact, up from 5% in March; 18% were uncertain, down from 31% in the spring.

Write to Ray A. Smith at Ray.Smith@wsj.com

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