The Challenges of the 2025 September Surge
As companies begin eyeing the end of Q3, one important decision comes to mind: to hire or not to hire?
The September Surge has traditionally seen companies looking to recruit new employees, and fast. But the 2025 landscape brings with it unique challenges that are causing companies to think more critically about how to hire.
AI and the Job Market in an Uncertain Economy
Two key elements are impacting hiring in the third and fourth quarters: economic instability and generative AI adoption.
Economic Instability
The continued volatility around tariffs and trade, among other issues, is adding complexity and ambiguity to economic forecasts. This uncertainty led to a drop in CFO profit expectations in Q2. With market instability impacting decision-making, some companies are responding by planning to hire fewer workers in the second half of 2025.
Generative AI Adoption
Over the next three years, AI adoption statistics show that 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments. However, only 1% of leaders believe their companies are prepared to fully integrate AI into their workflows to drive real change.
To best implement and utilize generative AI, companies need to invest in both reskilling current employees and hiring for new, AI-centric positions. These new positions include roles in compliance and ethics, along with more traditional data management and analysis roles. While necessary, the creation of entirely new AI roles will bring with it a learning curve for both employees and hiring managers trying to understand how these roles fit into the workflow.
These factors shouldn’t make your company shy away from bringing on new talent. But they should change the way you approach the hiring process. Instead of a race to hire, hiring decision-makers should consider turning this September Surge into an opportunity for smart, scalable talent strategies powered by contract and interim staffing.
Planning for the September Hiring Surge 2025
Taking advantage of the September Surge begins with understanding your hiring needs and then testing talent before committing resources to full-time hires.
Evaluate Your Business Transformation Recruitment Goals
Any hiring surge should begin with a thorough review of your company’s business transformation goals, objectives and efforts. This allows you to assess gaps in your strategy, identify what skills are needed and understand how hiring can fill those gaps.
This is a crucial step in the hiring process. Without this review, your September Surge hiring won’t have a strategic foundation, putting you at risk of wasting resources and seeing a loss of productivity. At this stage, it may be helpful to consult an outside agency to review your processes with fresh eyes to identify gaps and potential efficiencies. Our consultants can help guide your team throughout the business transformation process, starting with an audit of your talent needs.
Develop an AI Adoption Strategy
As you’re determining your company’s hiring needs, make sure you’re considering the role of AI in your company’s future and what roles may more heavily leverage AI in the future.
Hiring managers should reassess job descriptions with AI in mind. That might mean looking for candidates with previous experience utilizing AI, or those with the best potential for upskilling or reskilling. It may also mean creating entirely new positions, like AI compliance specialists, to keep up with the demands of this evolving landscape.
Test, Then Scale, Talent
The September Surge is the perfect opportunity to test talent models. We can work with your company to bring in interim talent to bridge the workloads during Q3 and Q4, including sourcing professionals with in-demand AI skills.
Working with interim talent allows you to understand how role requirements are evolving and what skill sets your company needs to support business goals, without investing resources in multiple new full-time hires. Once these needs are established, you can begin a fresh candidate search or consider a contract-to-hire pathway with your interim talent. The latter has the advantage of allowing you to assess both skill and culture fit, reducing the risk of attrition.
The Risks of Inaction
Rushing to hire without a clear plan of action during the September Surge puts your company’s business goals at risk. But not hiring during this period has its own consequences.
- Under-resourced departments can lead to missed deadlines and overburdened teams, increasing the risk of attrition
- A workforce with poor AI readiness may fail to utilize new technology to its greatest potential
- Those who don’t make smart hiring decisions during the September Surge may find themselves rushing to hire in Q4, leading to increased costs
All of this adds up to a loss of business transformation momentum heading into 2026. But with support from Aston Carter, you can set your company up for success for the start of 2026 Q1.
Get Staffing Support This September Surge
This September Surge isn’t business as usual. Trust Aston Carter to help you find the interim talent you need.
Our recruiters are immersed in the industries they support and understand how market trends and other emerging technologies are transforming staffing requirements across accounting, finance and corporate functions. We can quickly source talent with in-demand skills to help your company achieve your business transformation goals.
Our flexible talent solutions allow you to scale as needed, including building team capacity, filling talent gaps and ramp-up support for large-scale business and transformation projects.
Contact us to see how Aston Carter can support your accounting, finance and corporate hiring through the September Surge and beyond.
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