面试官说现在可能要经济衰退，而且公司也在裁员，所以没法跟我谈工资。

It's not the first time, but the current job market, especially as of this month, is neither a candidate's or employer's market. Employers are laying off and can demand a lot, yes, but that doesn't mean the position can be lowballed. Candidates are more than able to negotiate and demand basic things like an industry standard/experience based salary, but openings are rare in many markets.

In short, nobody knows what the hell is going on, but a recruiter/interviewer/hr person should not be talking down to candidates. If the economy is swirling the drain, you don't want to be a company known for being awful to employees.

Sometimes recruiters will get a bonus if they bring you in at low compensation. They'll use all sorts of doom and gloom scenarios and tell you that the company doesn't accept counter offering. But it's usually BS and they usually don't have the power to decide compensation, they just get a range to slot you in and need to get business unit approval to go outside that range. Put in your counter offer and it'll escalate to the hiring manager. At a hiring manager I always tell the recruiter to not low ball new hires because they're going to make it my problem for the next several years trying to bring them up to where they should be. I don't want unhappy employees right away when they start.

The amount of jobs these days that treat their employees like trash and then pay 'em close too or slightly over minimum is baffling. I can't think of a single place that I've worked for where they weren't under staffed/struggling to keep people yet refusing to increase the wage. When I was job hunting I applied to dozens of places and only got called back the once, the majority of the places I applied to still have yet to fill the position I applied for.

The power isn't in the employers' hands anymore, people have realized that there might be dozen of candidates, but there's also dozens of jobs. There's no rush to get one either. It's not like the current generation will ever be able to afford houses.

My experience is that HR does this because the salary ranges they are given are unrealistic and they know it or because they are get incentives when keeping salaries down for new hires. They also have no power to fix it.

Unfortunately, that means that the HR people either fail at their jobs or adopt unethical behaviors. This leads to the good HR people leaving. This leads to organizations staffed with only HR people who believe their job is to take advantage of every new hire.

Those companies always have issues, recession or not. They believe their job is to extract every penny of production out of every employee while keeping salaries as low as possible. It only works because finding a job is so challenging even when times are good.