Perspectives on Talent | 2026 market observations and predictions

Hi, my name is Jim Holt, I'm VP of Solutions here at Wilson.

And today, I'll be talking a little bit about my market observations and predictions in the RPO and hiring market for 2026.

So coming into this year, we were hearing a lot of optimism in the marketplace. But unfortunately, the prevalent theme right now is still a lot of uncertainty.

There's increased scrutiny on cost and the associated risk of engaging with partners of any size. Businesses are struggling still to project their performance, which then trickles down to HR and TA leaders who are facing a lot of uncertainty in terms of their hiring projections and how they need to plot their teams and their budgets for the year.

I'm hearing a lot of, we know we have to hire, but we don't know how many and we don't know when and we don't know where necessarily. I'm also hearing a lot about skills gaps in healthcare technology manufacturing becoming more and more acute. And you're also seeing and hearing a lot about the proliferation of AI usage on both sides of the process.

So one thing that I think that's impacting is eroding efficiencies that could be gained from AI usage by companies because candidates have just as much access to AI tools, if not more sometimes where they can match themselves to ideal candidate profiles or represent themselves and their skills that may or may not be as deep as they claim or maybe masking other candidates who are better suited to the rules.

I think it's interesting since it's kind of a continuation, what they'll be asking for in the future is kind of a continuation around a couple of different things.

The first is increased flexibility and offerings. Part of that is this emergence of this idea of modular RPO as kind of an offshoot of what project RPO was really described of as over the last couple of years. And again, going back to what we're seeing and hearing in the overall economy, there's an increased focus on mitigating risk wherever possible when they're selecting partners.

So it's not just enough to demonstrate that you have multiple clients with, know, where you've done similar work, but it then revolves back to what's your firm's reputation in the marketplace? How are you going beyond just the table stakes of providing flexible teams and, you know, different tools and technologies from a sourcing perspective. It's how are you integrating all of those different factors together to create a unique perspective for those clients in the marketplace?

We're also seeing that RPO buyers, even first generation RPO buyers who've never adopted this type of a solution in the past are much savvier in what they expect from partnerships.

There are less and less transactional requests in people that are looking at RPOs more of a long-term solution or a long-term partnership option. And there's no patience anymore for static solutions. If you're not bringing new ideas to the table as a partner, you're not bringing in new solutions or new abilities to tackle different categories of hiring, those folks are moving on to the next. They're just not seeing the value that you represent in a larger sense.

I think part of it is because HR and TA have finally gotten meaningful seats at the table. So they're now, when they go into executive meetings or they go into planning meetings or budgetary meetings, less and less organizations are viewing talent acquisition as a cost center. They're still viewing it as a cost. 

It hasn't gotten easier for those leaders to justify spend or to request new tools or resources, you know, when everybody's being asked to tighten their budgets. But because leaders, business leaders, or broadly in general, listening more and more to what HR and talent leaders have to say and what's important to consider as part of their overall initiatives, it has meant that they have to kind of go beyond traditional metrics and tie those traditional metrics back into kind of broader business success measurements.

Utilizing things like you know, not just relying on time to hire and cost per hire, but how do you quantify quality of hire and tie it back to cost of turnover or how do you tie it back to? Or you know, time to productivity for salespeople so that you can hit sales goals and quotas and timing the sales hires in an appropriate way and planning out those hiring initiatives correctly.

When you define what an ideal candidate profile is, it's not just, they have this degree, they come from this school and they've been with us for five years. It's they've led these types of projects. We've seen these people grow and develop in our organization. We've seen them really kind of take a foot for a forward stance in terms of participating in succession planning and being an asset that we can continue to kind of evolve and grow within our company.

So it's, it's trying to quantify some of that.

And in doing that again, it's interesting, it's kind of shifted the goal posts from, did you make the 500 hires that we told you you needed to make or not? It's did you do it fast enough? Did you make the right hires? Did you improve our company through diversity measures? Did you help us connect with new clients and new organizations? Are you helping to grow our revenue by making better quality hires and having people that will stay with us long term and are more aligned with us culturally and ethically?

And again, just from a, from a skills standpoint, you know, helping us evolve as a company that that expectation has now been put on TA to help them to help the company evolve by responding to these, these different shifts in skills and in the marketplace and just what's needed for for these companies to do business and to do it quickly.

So I think there's a couple of things that CHROS and other leaders can do to prepare for kind of this constant uncertainty that we're seeing right now. The first thing is to diversify your options.

A single track strategy, whether that is having internal only resources, RPO only resources, contract recruiter only resources leaves you vulnerable to variable conditions, whether that's rapid scaling or responding to new skills gaps or if you suddenly acquire a new company and have to recruit in new continents and countries that you've never had to recruit in before.

All of those, those different factors may or may not imply starting to prepare & things like preparatory MSAs with partners. So evaluating partners and finding the right ones, execute an MSA, get through your procurement and approval processes as quickly as you can so that you're ready when the unexpected happens.

It's almost like a little bit like insurance. Nobody wants to use it, but you're always glad when you have it. A preparatory MSA, you may not want to use it, but if you have it, it's a really good thing that you can tap a partner on the shoulder and say, gosh, this just happened. I need your help with this type of a modular RPO solution or I need your type of help. Can you provide me with a couple of contract recruiters?

I think one thing that positions us well in that regard is the fact that our MSAs don't carry any contractual or commercial terms. Rather they're contractual terms, but there are no commercial terms. So there's no cost to maintaining a preparatory MSA.

It prepares an organization whether they need talent consulting, market mapping, whether they need executive search or a couple of contingent recruiters or some temp to perm hiring or some form of RPO. It kind of covers all of those different contingencies and allows you to move much faster when when the need strikes.

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