AI is eating recruiting.And yet, hiring is slowing down.
According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly half of US companies are planning to freeze or slow down hiring in the second half of 2025, citing economic uncertainty, restructuring, and “wait-and-see” strategies. It’s a strange paradox: the tools for hyper-scaled hiring are better than ever, just as the appetite for scaling disappears.
So what happens to your HR tech stack when you’re hiring less, not more?
❄️ From Hiring Pipeline to Internal Clarity
Let’s be honest: when hiring slows, most HR teams just… wait.Wait for better budgets.Wait for approvals.Wait for someone to say “go.”
But this slow period might be the best moment to rethink how you’re using AI in HR - not to add more candidates to the funnel, but to understand what’s already happening inside.
- Who’s actually engaged in their team meetings?
- Which departments are burning hours in unproductive calls?
- Are your managers enabling collaboration - or draining it?
These are questions hiring dashboards won’t answer.But Ulla will.
🎯 AI That’s Built for Insight, Not Just Speed
While many AI hiring tools focus on automating speed - parsing resumes, scheduling interviews, scoring assessments - Ulla is built to analyze behavior, not resumes.
When you’re not onboarding 30 new people a month, it’s the retention and collaboration that actually drive value. Ulla helps you see:
- Which teams are running efficient meetings - and which are stuck in loops
- Whether psychological safety is improving or declining
- If certain voices dominate discussions while others disengage
- How clear communication is (and where it breaks down)
In other words: it’s not about more people. It’s about better conversations with the ones you already have.
📉 Hiring Freeze ≠ Insight Freeze
It’s easy to pause hiring.It’s harder to pause attrition.And impossible to pause internal politics.
During slow-growth periods, the cost of poor team dynamics becomes more visible - and more expensive. If you’re not growing headcount, your meetings are your product. Wasting time is literally burning budget.
Ulla HR gives executives and HR teams visibility into:
- Meeting quality
- Participation rates
- Sentiment shifts
- And individual trends in clarity, collaboration, and tone
That means fewer surprises, smoother team recalibration, and more intelligent leadership decisions - especially when resources are tight.
🔍 The Takeaway
If hiring has slowed but internal noise hasn’t - it’s time to look inward.The AI you need right now isn’t a hiring chatbot.It’s a listening agent that helps you understand what’s actually being said.
Ulla doesn’t just analyze meetings.It shows HR the patterns that drive retention, engagement, and - eventually - better hires.
No dashboards.No OpenAI.No noise.Just insight.