Flat recruiting budgets, rising HR tech spend

By SkavanderHR · 13 September 2026

Recruiting budgets going into 2026 are flat, and recruiter headcount is not coming back. Spending on hiring tools keeps climbing anyway. For a lean team the useful question is not which tool to buy next, but which part of hiring is still done by hand, and whether that part is the one deciding who you ever get to see.

Key takeaways

• Only 17% of HR executives expect their budget to grow, and only 24% expect to add recruiter headcount.
• The money moved to tools rather than people: HR technology spend rose about a fifth year on year through the third quarter of 2025.
• Most teams already own something that files applicants. Almost none own anything that finds the people who never applied.
• The workload the budget has to absorb keeps growing: Greenhouse’s own platform data shows an average of 254 applicants per posting.
• Spend where the work is manual and repeated every month, not on another place to store the same applicants.

What do the 2026 budget surveys actually say?

They say two things at once, and the pair is what matters. Budget owners do not expect more money and do not expect more people, yet the category spend keeps rising. That is not a contradiction. It is a substitution: buying capability instead of hiring it.

Recruiting budget and tooling signals reported for 2026

Figure	What it measures	Source
17% expect budget growth	Direction of the recruiting budget, tied for the lowest ever tracked	SHRM CHRO Employment Outlook; Pin, State of TA 2026
24% expect to add recruiter headcount	Whether the team gets bigger	SHRM CHRO Employment Outlook; Pin, State of TA 2026
Up about a fifth year on year	HR technology spend through the third quarter of 2025	Pin, State of TA 2026
78% run an applicant tracking system, 21% a recruiting CRM	What teams already own	Pin, Recruiting Tech Stack Report
68% of tools not connected	Of the roughly sixteen HR and recruiting tools an organisation runs	Pin, Recruiting Tech Stack Report
254 applicants per posting	The volume the same budget has to absorb	Greenhouse, AI in Hiring Report, 2025

Sources: SHRM CHRO Employment Outlook and Pin’s State of TA 2026 for the budget and headcount expectations; Pin’s Recruiting Tech Stack Report for the tooling figures; Greenhouse’s own platform data for applicants per posting, as named per row above. The budget and tooling figures come from employer surveys, so they record what buyers expect and own, not what they achieved.

Why does tool spend rise while recruiter headcount does not?

Because a tool is a line item and a recruiter is a commitment. A tool can be cancelled at the end of a term, it does not need onboarding, and nobody has to justify it in a headcount review. That makes it the easier purchase in a flat year, whatever its actual return.

The trouble is that most of what gets bought sits on the same side of the process. An applicant tracking system, a scheduler, an assessment, a careers site: all of them act on people who have already arrived. With 78% of teams already running an applicant tracking system and only 21% running anything resembling a recruiting CRM, the stack is heavily weighted toward handling inbound. If the problem is that the right people never arrive, another tool on that side of the line does nothing about it.

What should a lean team spend on first?

Three questions sort the list quickly.

First, does this remove work that repeats every single month, or does it remove work you do once? Scheduling and interview templates are worth having, but they are a one-off gain. Finding people is the part that starts again with every open role.

Second, does it change who you see, or only how you handle who you already see? Both have value, and they are not interchangeable. For a common role with plenty of qualified applicants, better handling is the real win. For a role where the applicants are simply not good enough, no amount of handling helps.

Third, what happens when you switch it off? An expense that you can stop the month it stops earning is a different kind of risk from an agency fee committed per hire, which commonly runs between about a seventh and about a third of the first year’s salary and is due whether or not you use the same agency again next quarter.

What this means for a company of twenty to five hundred people

At this size there is usually one person carrying recruitment alongside everything else in HR, and the flat budget lands on that person as a workload problem, not a spreadsheet problem. Two practical things follow.

The one you can act on this quarter: stop buying on the inbound side until you can name what the last purchase there changed. If applicants are arriving and some of them are strong, spend on speed, structure and a decent candidate experience. That is where the return is.

The one worth planning for: if the role you actually need is not producing strong applicants, the gap is in finding people, and it is the only gap that a flat budget genuinely punishes, because the usual fix is either a recruiter you cannot hire or an agency fee you did not plan for. It is worth comparing an agency, RPO, an embedded recruiter and a standing monthly search on that basis alone, before the next req opens rather than after.

The search as a monthly cost, not a fee per hire

We run the finding as a standing monthly job. The system looks through professional networks and company websites for every person in your market who matches the criteria for one specific role, and each of them is told about the role about that role. Your team keeps the interviews and the decisions. Everyone relevant is usually reached within two weeks of the search opening, it costs about a tenth of a recruiting agency, and because it is a monthly amount rather than a fee on an outcome, it stops the month you stop needing it. For a role such as data platform engineering, where the certified people are rarely on a job board at all, that is the part of the budget that decides whether you see them. How the search runs is deliberately short to read.

A flat year is not a reason to hire worse. It is a reason to be honest about which line item is doing the work.

Numbers from our own searches. Written and checked by SkavanderHR.