Buyers are shopping for advisors, not vendors

Here's what Tony told buyers this morning:

"Permanent hiring is effectively stalled. Contingent and flexible workforce volume is at its highest point of the year. Enterprises are not waiting for clarity before getting work done. They are routing around it." Tony Buffum Chief Strategy Officer, Human Cloud

Our search data is the other half of that sentence. Advisory and consulting searches rose 150% this month. Automation rose 50%. Every broad industry bucket we track fell over the same period.

Buyers routing around a hiring freeze do not browse a sector to see what exists. They are looking for someone who has already solved the exact problem in front of them, in a business that looks like theirs. Eighty-three distinct categories were searched in the last full week, which is what that looks like at the platform level.

So the positioning move is a narrow one. Naming your industry is the broad claim that gets skipped. The profiles that surface are the ones that name the decision they help make and the outcome they have already delivered.

HC Search Trends

Every 74 seconds, someone is looking at a solution profile on Human Cloud. Here is what they are searching to find them.

Advisory Consulting	+150% this month
Automation	+50% this month
Biotechnology	Neutral
Civil Engineering	-25% this month
Technology SaaS	-33% this month
Healthcare and Life Sciences	-43% this month
Consumer Electronics	-50% this month

Percentages are this month vs last month.

New on the platform this month: productivity, field services, digital banking, HR technology, nonprofit, athletics, food service, ecommerce, Shopify, biotech, deep tech, culinary, and hospitality. None of these were searched at all last month.

If one of these describes what you actually do, that is the language worth putting on your profile.