You Are the First Thing They Cut

A Wake-Up Call For Action

Last week, Meta laid off another round of employees. Second time this year. They hit Reality Labs, Facebook operations, sales, and recruiting. Recruiting was hit hardest.

Read that again. The company, with $200 billion in annual revenue and growing cloud revenue while posting record profits, cut its recruiting team first.

Not legal. Not finance. Not the layers of middle management that every CEO publicly claims to despise.

Recruiting.

The Pattern Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Here is how AI restructuring works at big companies.

First, the company spends 12 to 18 months investing heavily in AI infrastructure.

Second, leadership conducts an internal audit of which roles can be automated or reduced. They look at functions that are cost centers with no discernible strategic value.

Third, the layoffs arrive, blaming AI and framed as a competitive necessity.

Fourth, recruiting is among the first teams to be reduced because leadership has already concluded that hiring is slowing and that AI tools can absorb the rest.

From an executive perspective, if you are hiring fewer people, you need fewer recruiters. If AI is screening applications, you need fewer coordinators. If robotic agents are sourcing and doing outreach, you need fewer sourcers.

We have seen 45,000 to 60,000 tech jobs eliminated in Q1 2026 alone. That is a 51% increase over Q1 2025. Of those cuts, roughly 20% are being explicitly attributed to AI by the companies themselves. The other 80%? Cost restructuring, post-pandemic correction, and Wall Street pressure for margin improvement.

But recruiting gets cut in either case, because recruiting is seen as a cost function tied to hiring volume. When volume drops, the function does too.

The Uncomfortable Question Nobody Is Asking
We have spent years arguing for a seat at the table. We have done everything we can think of, from strategic workforce planning to developing quality-of-hire metrics to establishing a talent intelligence function. We talk about how indispensable we are, but executives don’t buy it. Recruiters are seen as transactional, easily replaced when needed.

Companies cut the recruiting team before the analytics team, before the marketing team, and in some cases before the teams that haven’t shipped anything in two years.

So, we have tried to build the case for strategic value, but executives still see it as a cost center.

While some TA leaders have genuinely transformed their functions into workforce intelligence operations that leadership cannot imagine operating without. Most have not.

Most are still measured on time to fill and requisition load, which are metrics that describe activity and throughput, not impact.

When the AI restructuring wave arrives, executives cut throughput functions first. They protect judgment functions.

What Is Actually Happening to the Talent Pipeline
There is a secondary crisis developing underneath the headline layoff numbers that recruiting leaders should be loudly raising right now. Entry-level job postings on platforms like Handshake are down 15% year over year. Applications per vacancy are up 30%. Companies are eliminating the roles that feed leadership pipelines, and nobody in the C-suite is modeling what the organization will look like in five years when there is no internal bench.

This is TA’s argument to make. Not “we need more budget for sourcing tools.” The argument is: the people being cut today are the senior leaders of 2030. Eliminating entry-level roles in the name of AI efficiency is placing a bet that AI will produce senior judgment when you need it. There is no evidence that is true.

73% of TA leaders in Korn Ferry’s 2026 data say critical thinking is the skill they need most. AI skills rank fifth. The judgment required to lead organizations does not come from a prompt. It comes from years of experiencing failure and getting feedback inside an organization. You cannot source it later. You have to grow it now.

What TA Leaders Should Do Differently
I have argued for years that our normal metrics are rubbish. Stop measuring yourself by hiring volume and activity metrics. Volume and speed metrics make your function look like a cost center.