What Jason Averbook Just Got Right About the Headcount Illusion

Jason Averbook is a workforce strategist and one of the more reliably provocative voices in HR — not because he traffics in buzzwords, but because he tends to say the uncomfortable thing before the room is ready to hear it. His latest argument, made in a widely circulated interview, is one of those moments.

The claim that should stop your next board deck cold: Jason Averbook, writing for HR Executive (2025), argues that in 2026, layoff trackers are a rearview mirror — a lagging signal that tells HR leaders where the workforce was, not where it is going — and that organizations fixated on headcount are systematically misreading the nature of the risk in front of them.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. Averbook's core contention is that the dominant unit of workforce analysis — the job — is the wrong unit. Skills, not seats, are what determine whether an organization can execute its strategy. When a team of 200 loses 20 people, the headline number is the headcount reduction. The real question — which skills just walked out the door, and which ones are now absent from the system — rarely gets tracked with the same rigor. The 180 who remain may collectively hold less organizational capability than the 200 who were there before.

Why are layoff trackers the wrong tool for 2026?

Layoff trackers aggregate announced reductions from public companies and present them as a proxy for workforce health. The problem is what they measure: events, not states. A company can announce 500 layoffs and simultaneously be understaffed in the three skill clusters that matter most to its next 18 months of execution. The tracker captures the cut; it does not capture the gap. Averbook's argument is that HR leaders who treat layoff data as a strategic signal are essentially navigating by the exhaust, not the engine.

The mechanism here is worth spelling out plainly for anyone new to the framing: skills-based workforce management means organizing talent strategy around discrete, transferable capabilities — data analysis, system integration, regulatory interpretation, human judgment in ambiguous situations — rather than around job titles or headcount targets. When you manage by skills, a 5% workforce reduction may be strategically neutral or catastrophic depending entirely on which skills were concentrated in the exited population. Headcount tells you neither.

What should HR leaders actually be tracking instead?

HR Executive (2025) reports that Averbook's prescription for 2026 is direct: shift the primary workforce health metric from headcount to skills inventory and skills velocity — meaning not just what capabilities exist today, but how quickly new ones are being acquired across the organization. This requires infrastructure most HR functions do not yet have. Skills ontologies, continuous learning signals, and internal talent marketplaces are not exotic tools, but they are underdeployed relative to the urgency Averbook is describing.

The case for urgency is sharpened by what is happening simultaneously in hiring. HR Dive (2025) reports that the volume of job applications has tripled in recent years — a signal that the external labor market has become both noisier and harder to read. When inbound volume triples, the instinct is to automate screening. But HR Executive (2025) documents a "visibility gap" in which AI-assisted resume screening is filtering out qualified candidates before a human ever sees them, compounding the problem of skills-based mismatch rather than solving it. You can end up with more candidates, faster rejection, and less skill coverage — all at once.

Averbook's framework cuts through both dynamics. If you know precisely which skills you need, and you have a live inventory of which ones exist inside the organization, the hiring question becomes sharper: you are filling a specific capability gap, not a headcount slot. That precision changes what you ask of screening tools, what you measure in interviews, and what success looks like at 90 days.

The actionable takeaway from Averbook's work is this: before your next workforce planning cycle, ask your team to produce a skills-gap report alongside the headcount report — and then ask which one would be more useful to your chief executive officer (CEO) in a scenario where revenue assumptions shift by 15% in either direction. If the answer is the headcount report, you have diagnosed the problem Averbook is describing.

The organizations that will be best positioned in 2026 are not the ones that tracked the most layoffs — they are the ones that knew, at any given moment, exactly what they could and could not do with the people they had.