2025 IT headcount expectations lowest in over a decade

Predictions are all about timing, but sentiment can take a long time to sway.

That may be a key tension unfolding for the 2025 IT hiring market, as evidenced by IT recruitment firm Harvey Nash stepping back from the ramifications of its own recent survey of CIOs, who were decidedly pessimistic about IT hiring in the new year.

Harvey Nash’s survey found that only 36% of CIOs believed IT headcounts would increase in 2025 — the lowest such sentiment reported since 2011. 

Jason Pyle, Harvey Nash’s president and managing director, told CIO.com that those CIO sentiment projections may have shifted since they were recorded, which was before the US economy stabilized.

“There’s a changing economic landscape. The economy simply isn’t in a recession,” which had been a fear among many enterprise CIOs, Pyle claimed. “Their worries did not come true.”

Still, many industry observers disagree about IT hiring for 2025, underscoring the mixed signals around the current state of IT jobs. Consider gen AI. Some have argued that gen AI efficiencies may depress IT hiring, while others predict the need for more gen AI talent will boost IT workforce numbers next year. Those arguing for a boom concede that gen AI may ultimately lead to IT hiring reductions several years down the line.

“It will be a long way to go before they will see reduced hiring,” said Pyle, who is a 2025 gen AI hiring boom believer. “It is going to take time to gain those efficiencies. We will see increased hiring over the coming years.”

Amy Loomis, an IDC research VP, is more circumspect about predicting what IT hiring in 2025 will look like due to differences across various verticals. “I expect IT hiring [for 2025] to be flat or go higher depending on the vertical,” said Loomis, who agreed with Pyle that gen AI will be a critical factor, along with the need to support and clean up legacy systems.

Both argued that need for talent capable of creating homegrown gen AI apps or managing and retraining external gen AI algorithms will certainly increase. 

“We need to keep the people who understand LLMs, who are fluent in Python and can work with various models,” Loomis said. 

Gina Smith, an IDC research director, said CIOs will have to balance hiring people with the needed skills versus training current talent in new domains. 

“I am skeptical that the majority of companies will choose to upskill these people” because IT executives “are beholden to the bottom line,” Smith said. “The rate of new technologies is rapidly accelerating. We can’t keep them up to date because the requirements keep changing.”

Talent shortages — or, more precisely, the shortage of skilled workers willing to take jobs at the rate most enterprise CIOs are willing to pay given tightening IT budgets — will be another key factor.

“At the end of the day, it is all about pay and package and benefits and flexibility,” Pyle said. “If you pay the right price, you certainly have a better chance of attracting that talent.”

And that perhaps may be at the root of the surveyed CIOs sentiment on their 2025 IT headcount expectations: Well versed in the need for more highly skilled talent, CIOs may still be pessimistic about their enterprise’s ability and capacity to expand — even if economic winds may have since changed.

Overall, the survey’s results paint a picture of an IT hiring market still on the rise, just not as broadly as in years past.

Caitlin Wehniainen, director of business development for On Cue Hire, underscored the ongoing evolution of IT hiring when considering the survey’s findings.

“After 14 years in IT staffing, I’ve seen hiring evolve, not slow down. The shift is in the way companies are hiring, not how much they are hiring,” Wehniainen said. “Routine maintenance and support tasks are increasingly outsourced or automated, enabling companies to focus on roles that demand hybrid skill sets. Today, technical proficiency alone isn’t enough because our clients want professionals who can interface with executives, collaborate with stakeholders, and think strategically, bringing ideas to the conference table. Roles that merge analytics and engineering, for example, are becoming more common.”