It's Saturday evening, 20:30.
I booked myself a hotel for the weekend. No meetings, no Slack, no distractions. Just me, a laptop, and Q4 planning for Employ Borderless.
Sometimes you need a different room to think about the next three months.
And the question I keep circling back to is the obvious one. Is this market actually slowing down?
Honestly? It feels like it. And everyone seems to have already decided why. AI, or the economy. Usually AI.
Then on Tuesday, HubSpot announced it's cutting nearly 660 people. About 7% of the company.
Within an hour, my LinkedIn feed knew exactly what it meant. AI is here. The jobs are going. Hiring is over.
So tonight, before I plan anything, I did the boring thing first. I read the memo. Then the data.
Neither says what my feed says.
What HubSpot actually said
I'll be honest, I expected the usual corporate language. But CEO Yamini Rangan was pretty direct. The cuts are not driven by AI-related efficiencies. Not simply a cost-cutting exercise either.
The goal is a flatter company. Fewer management layers. Decisions closer to the people actually doing the work. A lot of the roles cut were management roles.
And this isn't a company in trouble. HubSpot reported $911.7 million in revenue for Q2 2026, up about 20% year over year.
So: a growing company, reorganizing how it's structured. That's a very different story from "AI replaced 660 people."
One detail in the memo caught my attention for another reason. US employees would hear by email within 15 minutes. In every other country, the process depends on local laws and practices.
That's one sentence in a memo. For anyone employing people across borders, it's the whole job. Notice periods, consultation rules, severance formulas. Every country is different.
HubSpot has legal and HR teams in every market to handle that. Most companies hiring their first person abroad don't.
What the hiring data actually says
ManpowerGroup surveys more than 39,000 employers in 41 countries every quarter. Their global hiring outlook for early 2026 came in at 24%. Down 4 points from a year earlier.
Sounds bad. Until you see that the average over the previous nine quarters is also 24%.
Slower. Not collapsing.
The slowdown sits mostly with the biggest companies. Mid-sized companies, 250 to 999 people, were the most confident about hiring.
And the AI part? ManpowerGroup's own CEO said AI will drive productivity, but right now it's the economy shaping hiring decisions. LinkedIn's research points the same way: interest rates and macro conditions, not AI displacement, are behind the slowdown in advanced economies.
Meanwhile, some markets are doing just fine. Brazil and India posted the strongest hiring intentions in the survey, at 54% and 52%. APAC has been the strongest region since early 2021.
So my read, for what it's worth: Hiring is cautious, uneven, and mostly driven by the economy. AI is a real long-term force. It's just not what's slowing hiring this year.
Why I still think this is a long-term market
This is the part I keep coming back to while planning. Even when hiring slows, the way companies hire across borders keeps moving in one direction.
Atlas HXM's 2026 report found 53% of organizations now use an EOR, overtaking owned foreign entities at 48%. Companies that do hire abroad increasingly skip the entity setup entirely.
The contractor shortcut is also closing. Governments are actively reclassifying cross-border contractors whose work looks like employment. I wrote about this back in March. The risk doesn't announce itself, until it does.
And cost matters more in a downturn, not less. When budgets tighten, companies stop looking at salary alone and start looking at total employment cost. My Global Employer Burden Index showed the same $50,000 salary costs about $54,000 in the US and about $68,200 in France. Before any benefits.
Companies hiring fewer people want every hire to count. Hiring globally is how smaller companies compete with bigger ones for good people.
I've worked in international hiring for a while now, and this isn't the first quiet stretch I've seen. Could I be wrong about this one? Sure. But I don't think talent stops being global because interest rates are high.
If you're hiring right now
Nothing fancy here. Just what I'd do if I were in your seat.
Hire for the roles that actually move the business, and look at where the talent and the total cost make sense. Not just where the salary is lowest.
If you have long-term contractors abroad who look like employees, deal with it now. On your timeline, not a tax authority's.
Get the real cost before you sign anything. Total monthly fee, exchange rate margin, deposit. I put twelve questions for that in writing in August.
And plan the exit as carefully as the start. HubSpot's memo is a good reminder: ending employment abroad is where local law bites hardest. Ask your provider how termination works in each country before you onboard anyone there.
The headlines say hiring is over. The data says hiring is cautious.
Those are two very different markets to build in. I know which one I'm planning for.
Anyway. It's getting late, and Q4 isn't going to plan itself.
If you're hiring internationally, everything we build at employborderless.com is free to use.
- Robbin