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• Recruiter Reflections

Preparing for 2026 in an Unpredictable World

January 6, 2026

In my Q2 2025 blog, I made a case that business cycles are no longer organic. They are man-made. Be it 9/11, the sub-prime implosion, or Covid… it seems our parents’ predictable recessions have gone the way of the dinosaurs, leaving us to invent new ways to forecast and act on what comes next.

Clearly, bad things can happen (see exhibits A, B, and C above). So, heading into 2026, let’s do a little thought experiment and just assume an asteroid hits the planet. Let’s assume it was asteroid “I”, shorten it to AI, and assume it killed us all. So that’s it, we’re all dinosaur dead. Or, at the very least, AI took all of our jobs. Should we even try anymore? 

Fortunately, that DIDN’T happen… and because this prognostication is not helpful and fairly depressing, let’s instead reflect on what DID happen. Perhaps that might give us some hints to help us prepare for 2026. 

In 2025 we were told that, in addition to AI shockwaves, there were actually a number of asteroids hurtling towards Earth… tariffs, interest rates, political uncertainty, debt gravity, and exhausted consumers… all of which could take us down.

But, do you know what happened?  Not much.  As a matter of fact, it looks like Earth seems to have dodged them all… Inflation cooled. GDP growth kept on a pretty good trajectory. Unemployment remained near historical lows.  Consumer spending held up.  With that much chaos potentially raining down, it wasn’t a bad result actually.

Fortunately, at High Country, we tried to live out the advice from that Q2 blog. We added more new recruiters in 2025 than we’ve ever added. As it turns out, other people’s worries created a pretty serious pocket of opportunity for us. We found more great talent than we’ve ever found and put it to work. And we learned something important about AI along the way; it wasn’t interested in taking our jobs if we used it well and still did our jobs well. We made investment hires and they paid off.  And now that many of the scariest asteroids appear to have passed us by, we’re incredibly well positioned for a fantastic 2026.

Here’s the point.

Whether you’re a job seeker, a hiring manager, or a recruiter, if you’re staring into the 2026 crystal ball, don’t expect it to give you clear answers. Instead, get painfully honest with yourself about your best-case and worst-case scenarios. Assign rough probabilities and make a plan for each.

Then do the part most people skip: act.

Because in a world where the next “cycle” might be tomorrow’s headline, the advantage rarely goes to the person or company with the cleanest prediction. It goes to the one who stays clear-eyed, keeps moving, and is willing to invest while everyone else is frozen, waiting for certainty.

We can’t stop asteroids. But, if 2025 taught us anything, it’s this: the sky isn’t falling, you’re still here, still standing, and still able to make the next smart move.

So, how about this for a plan for 2026: less doom-scrolling, more decision-making. Less forecasting the impact. More building through it.

Time to get to work.

Monte Merz

Founder / Managing Partner

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