Jobs aren't growing. The work is.

Jobs aren't growing. The work is.

We have two exciting immediate opportunities right now.

• Annual flexible workforce study: Do you want data on how companies are using, struggling with, and planning to use flexible talent? Join our annual study with Independently.

  Join the study →

• Dinner in Dallas later this month: Will you be in Dallas September 29th? We'd love to have you at Del Frisco's with 20 peers and our distinguished guest Dr Kelly Monahan.

  Request a seat →

Now for this week's update.

Here's what stands out this week:

• Hiring has stalled. Private employers added 38,000 jobs in August, the slowest month since January. Manufacturing, professional services, and information all shed jobs.^[1]
• But nobody is firing. Job openings edged up to 7.3 million in July, hires slipped to 5.1 million, and layoffs fell to 1.7 million, a six-month low.^[2]
• AI investment is a people investment. Porsche signed a five-year, $1.5 billion deal with Tata Consultancy Services to deploy AI across engineering, manufacturing, operations, and customer experience, and TCS is taking on the 4,500 consultants at Porsche's MHP unit to do it.^[3]
• The H-1B channel just got priced out. DHS proposed a $103,265 fee on every new cap-subject H-1B petition, with comments closing September 24,^[4] and a $4,000 biometric fee now hits H-1B extensions from September 9.^[5]

Access all stories in your executive community portal >>

Here's how I interpret the data

1. Low hire, low fire is now the operating model. 38,000 private jobs in a month is not a hiring market. A six-month low in layoffs is not a cutting market either. Companies are holding the permanent base flat in both directions and waiting to see what the fall brings.
2. Jobs aren't growing. The work is. Look at where Porsche put its money: $1.5 billion, not on software licenses, on people to build, run, and own the AI rollout. Every company making an AI investment is learning the same thing. The model is the cheap part. The humans who make it work inside your environment are the constraint, and the best leaders I talk to have stopped pretending that capacity comes from a requisition. They bring it in flexibly, by project and by outcome.
3. H-1B was the specialist channel. It just got priced out. We predicted this: when the fee was first announced last September, I wrote that it might be the best news ever for marketplaces and EORs. A six-figure fee before day one, on a petition that was already a lottery, plus new fees on extensions and tighter rules on third-party placement. If your AI and engineering plan leaned on sponsored talent, it needs a second channel now: global talent through an EOR, specialist platforms, and project-based benches you can turn on this quarter, not next April.
4. This is exactly why we are running the study. Everyone has an opinion on how companies use flexible talent. Very few have the data from both sides of the market, the buyers and the solutions serving them, answered separately and published together. Add your answers and you see the results before anyone else does.

Here's how Human Cloud is helping:

The executive community is where this conversation is already happening, with peers who are building talent access models inside real organizations rather than reading about them. The Dallas dinner is one night of it. The room runs all year.

And when the question is what flexible talent actually costs and who delivers it, an RFP gets you to a real answer without months of vendor analysis. EOR is the sharpest example: you can see EOR pricing without a single intro call.

We'd love to see how we can help,

- Tony

Tony Buffum Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Human Cloud. 20+ years in global HR and talent transformation. Former CHRO at FLIR Systems, VP HR at Stanley Black & Decker, VP HR Client Strategy at Upwork. Grab time with me »

PS: If you would rather bring your own leadership team, we are running private Executive Briefings in Dallas the same week as CWS. One session on flexible talent, talent platforms, and the increasingly independent workforce, built on what we see across the market every week. Book a briefing »

Human Cloud Data

Nobody is opening reqs. Everybody is searching for AI

Every 59 seconds, someone is looking at a solution profile on Human Cloud. Here is what they are searching to find them.

What the data shows

AI searches rose 250% this month. Engineering and strategy each rose 150%. Freelancers, accounting, board-level talent, industrial manufacturing, and edtech each rose 100%.

Read that against the hiring numbers above. Companies added 38,000 jobs and cut almost nobody, yet searches for AI and engineering capacity more than doubled and the word "freelancers" doubled as a search on its own. That is what low hire looks like from the demand side. The need did not go away. It moved from the requisition to the search bar, and from a headcount decision to a project decision. It is the Porsche story at every size of company: the AI budget is approved, and the search is for the people who can make it real.

AI	+250% this month
Engineering	+150% this month
Strategy	+150% this month
Freelancers	+100% this month
Accounting	+100% this month
Board	+100% this month
Industrial Manufacturing	+100% this month
EdTech	+100% this month
C-Suite	+67% this month
Healthcare	+20% this month

Percentages are this month vs last month.

Open Cloud

What an RFP looks like on Human Cloud

There is no minimum and no template to fit. This summer, companies posted everything from a single engineer for under $10,000 to a $1 million EOR program. Three real ones, each one click from becoming yours:

• One GCP-certified DevOps engineer to harden a Series A AI platform's staging and production environments. GKE, Terraform, Argo CD, incident response. Copy this RFP »
• A bench of SOX consultants with hands-on audit experience, sized for two to five active engagements a quarter. Copy this RFP »
• An EOR for a transformation consultancy paying talent across five US states and three-plus countries, $500k to $1m a year. Copy this RFP »

Need AI developers? There was an RFP for that. SOX consultants? There was an RFP for that. Whatever your version is, write it down and let the market answer.

Launch an RFP →

Or browse the open RFP board first.