The ‘Great Hesitation' That's Making It Harder to Get a Tech Job

Wall Street Journal

18-05-2025

The uncertain economic climate is adding to tech workers' woes.
Those who have jobs are staying put, trying to figure out how they can stay relevant with the pivot to artificial intelligence and continued threat of layoffs. Those job hunting are finding recruiters insisting salary expectations be divulged in the first phone call, job postings pulled at the last minute and bots ruling out their résumé before it lands in front of a human. Companies are prolonging their hiring processes, leveraging contract workers or holding out for candidates who check every single box—and then some.
'It's the great hesitation,' says George Denlinger, operational president of U.S. technology talent solutions with staffing firm Robert Half. 'The hiring process might be two to three times longer than it was a year ago.'
During times of uncertainty, companies are gun-shy: They take their time, fill only critical roles and raise the bar for hiring, Denlinger says. They previously might have required six or seven different skills for a given role but now may want 10 or 12, 'and those skills are associated with things that align with AI,' he adds.
'There are a lot of jobs, but there are more people looking,' says Steve Levine, a 54-year-old on Long Island, N.Y., who was recently laid off. 'Lots of things that I've applied for and targeted that I'm very qualified for, I don't get any response.'
Levine has applied for around 50 sales-engineering and solutions-consultant jobs since January. He recently made it to the final round with one company and had to deliver a presentation in front of a panel, only to be told the company had decided not to fill the role, citing changing priorities. It's not you, it's us, he says they told him.
Employment in technology fields across all sectors fell by around 214,000 jobs in April, according to tech trade association CompTIA, which analyzes data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The tech unemployment rate dropped to 4.6% from 5% the month before, according to the BLS data. But 5% to 6% of unemployed IT professionals left the sector in that period, says Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of Janco Associates. Tech companies continue to trim head count, putting fresh talent back on the market: Microsoft last week shed around 6,000 jobs.
'It's much more than the Amazons and the Googles,' says Janulaitis. 'It's all the midsize companies where there's an IT department of 20 to 100 people.'
Janulaitis, who analyzes BLS data, says there has been 'shrinkage' in the size of the IT job market and that early-career coders have been hit especially hard because much of what they do can now be done by AI.
'A job that has been eliminated from almost all IT departments is an entry-level IT programmer, an IT analyst, someone who has got a degree in computer science,' he says.
Companies have also shifted enormous resources to AI, leading to cost-cutting elsewhere. That increases demand for related capabilities, with nearly 1 in 4 jobs posted so far this year requiring AI skills.
More CEOs are declaring their companies AI-first: Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn recently wrote in a company email that head count will be approved only if a team can't automate more of its work and that AI use will be considered during performance reviews. A recent survey of more than 250 technology leaders by Robert Half found that 76% reported a skills gap in their department. And 65% said they were increasing the number of contract hires this year.
'People that have advanced technical degrees are not getting responses from companies,' says Angela Jiang, who is working in San Francisco on a startup exploring the impact of AI on the labor market.
Jiang worked at OpenAI until late last year, and recently held one-on-one meetings with more than 50 tech workers to answer their questions about how to stand out in the current job market. (There is a wait-list with 118 more people.)
One software engineer with a masters in computer science lamented that he wasn't landing interviews; others wanted to know how to leverage their background to be effective in an AI-related role, and what more they needed to learn to be marketable.
'People are just scared,' she says. 'They don't know where they fit in this new world.'
While senior engineers are still in high demand, companies have adjusted their expectations of them with respect to performance and seniority, according to Sophie Novati, founder of Formation, a job-placement and fellowship company for engineers.
'They are responsible for ensuring whatever code is being generated by this AI is going to meet the requirements of the organization,' she says.
William Wilkerson, 32, was laid off last month from his job as a software engineer with Automattic, the company that owns WordPress and Tumblr. He is doing contract work while job hunting. He has noticed an uptick in roles looking for someone who can integrate generative-AI workflows and tools, and a noticeable dearth of midlevel job openings.
Even with AI experience—he says he built AI software to determine whether a piece of content was suitable to have ads next to it—Wilkerson worries about the odds of getting his résumé in front of a person because AI systems in many cases have replaced human review.
'If you don't provide the correct little buzzwords, you're not going to get to the next step,' he says.
Over the past eight years, hiring of AI talent has increased by 640% in the U.S., according to data from LinkedIn.
Annie Murray, who advises tech workers on compensation negotiations, says the only people who seem immune to the current conditions are data scientists and researchers in the AI space, and especially those with Ph.D.s.
The lopsided supply and demand is leading to harsher tactics among recruiting teams: Candidates can no longer push off sharing their salary requirements at the earliest stages.
'Companies will not take no for an answer for that question,' says Murray. 'The reason they're doing it is to weed folks out if they're too expensive.'
Write to Katherine Bindley at [e-mail]