2024 Hiring and Recruiting Stats to Help You Plan Your Year

Hiring Data Helps You Plan Your Recruiting Strategy

Indeed's 2024 US Jobs & Hiring Trends Report finds that after a pretty good 2023 in terms of hiring and recruiting, 2024's hiring and recruiting climate will potentially be easier than it's been in the past. It finds that focusing on filling roles with high-quality candidates will be a top priority. 

Savvy organizations will begin to audit and reevaluate their hiring and recruiting strategies to plan for the future. What do smart recruiters use to revamp and plan? Data! Facts, statistics, and studies on the recruiting process provide invaluable insights into where job markets are heading, what’s worked and not worked in the past, and what today’s job candidates want. 

We live in a world with seemingly endless information at our fingertips, which can make parsing the valuable from the click-bait difficult. That’s where HiringThing can help! Being on the pulse of hiring and recruiting trends is our thing. We’ve gathered all the most valuable hiring and recruiting statistics you need in one place, so you can concentrate on being ready for the new realities of recruiting.

This Post Will Cover:

• Hiring in 2024
• What today’s job seekers want.
• How today’s job seekers search for new opportunities. 
• How today’s employers recruit. 
• Related resources

Hiring in 2043

Hiring is complicated right now, but we wanted to cut through all the noise and provide you with some stats to encapsulate what hiring looks like today. 

• As of 2018, millennials (which the Pew Research Center defines as those born between 1981 and 1996) became the majority generation in the U.S. workforce—75% of the U.S. workforce will be millennials by 2025. 
• 64% of hiring managers say skills testing is vital for faster candidate screening, but only 40% of hirers have invested money in screening tools. 
• Millennials overwhelmingly want companies to stand for something. A joint Glassdoor/Harris poll found 76% of job seekers say an organization’s diversity matters when deciding whether or not to apply. 
• The JobVite 2021 Recruiter Nation Report says the top five priorities of recruitment professionals in 2021 included improving the quality of hires (52%), increasing retention (24%), improving time-to-hire (23%), growing talent pipelines (22%), and diversity hiring (22%). They expect these priorities to extend into 2022. 
• Job seekers will sacrifice up to 12% of their salary for increased flexibility and professional development. Hint: Offer job candidates remote work!
• LinkedIn reports the average time-to-hire was 41 days.

What Job Seekers Want

A good candidate experience is vital in 2023—competition for workers is stronger than ever. Forward-thinking employers would be wise to approach recruiting like marketing and determine what their job seekers want. 

• A CareerArc study on what job candidates look for found 69% of candidates want the application process to proceed quickly and see employer response time improved. 
• While millennials (the workforce’s majority generation) were once stereotyped as flighty workers, more and more are looking to put down longer-term workplace roots. Deloitte’s Millennial Survey found millennials are now more likely to want to stay at a company for 5+ years than to leave within 1-2. 
• Aside from diversity, Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report found 87% of millennials rated professional career growth as important at their job. Udemy uncovered that 42% of job seekers report that expanding their skill sets is a top priority when choosing a new role or company. LinkedIn found career advancement is the number one reason people change jobs. 
• A Glassdoor study found 96% of job seekers say it’s important to work for a company that embraces transparency. 
• Today’s employees value their paid time off (PTO). Gallup found 53% of employees who get PTO would leave their current role for more vacation days at another company.
• Candidates value interview feedback and are 4x more likely to consider a company for future opportunities if provided thoughtful feedback. 52% of job hunters say lack of response from employers is their number one gripe about their job search.
• 82% of job seekers expect employers to provide a clear hiring timeline and keep them updated throughout that process—86% of applicants want employers to treat them with the same deference they give current employees. 
• Today’s job seekers love video content! The candidate application rate increases by 34% when a job post includes a video.

How Job Seekers Find Jobs

LinkedIn data found that 70% of the global workforce is passive talent who aren’t actively seeking jobs but are open to opportunities. That’s important to consider when setting up your recruiting strategy. It’s also important to know where active job seekers are looking for new labor opportunities. 

• The number one way people discover jobs is through referrals—employers fill up to 85% of jobs through networking. Referrals are 5x more effective than all other hiring sources, and 46% of employees hired through referral programs stay for three years or more, while only 14% of those employed through job boards do the same.
• According to LinkedIn, 60% of job seekers use online job boards, 56% use professional networks, and 50% of job seekers find opportunities through word of mouth. 
• Glassdoor found the average job-seeker will visit 7.6 job boards during their search. 
• Glassdoor also found 79% of job seekers use social media in their job searches and 83% of job candidates are active on Facebook. 
• 64% of job candidates say they do online research on the company while deciding whether or not to apply, and 37% won’t apply if they can’t find sufficient information. 
• 58% of job seekers job hunt on their phones—promoting a job application as mobile-friendly will increase the number of job applicants by 11.6%. Despite this data, too many applications aren’t mobile-friendly—mobile applicants complete 53% fewer applications and take 80% longer to complete applications than those from their computers. 

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How Employers Recruit

84% of organizations use social media to advertise their employment opportunities, while a CNBC report states that 58% of recruiters who weren’t using social media, have adapted their recruitment process due to COVID-19 changes and now utilizing social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram to advertise jobs. Knowing how others recruit lets you see what they’re doing correctly or make choices that can make your recruiting stand out.

• According to Jobbatical, 60% of job employers utilize video interviews, at least for the first round of interviews. 
• Jobvite found that 77% of recruiters will go back and hire candidates that didn't seem like they’d be a good fit at first glance.
• Today’s job seekers want to know about salary or benefits before applying for a job. Still, according to 2019 LinkedIn data, only 27% of employers said they were transparent about salaries and pay range, despite Indeed finding job postings that include a salary range get 66% more engagement than those which don’t. 
• Soft skills and social skills are critical for employers and something they assess during the hiring process—89% of hiring professionals told LinkedIn that bad hires often lack soft skills, and 93% of employers consider soft skills an “essential” or “very important” factor in hiring someone. According to Career Builder, 75% of employers use behavioral interview questions to assess job candidates’ soft skills. 
• Internal hiring is 6x more effective than all other sources of hiring.

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An Applicant Tracking System Can Be a Recruiting Gamechanger

Hopefully, these statistics can help you audit your hiring strategy and formulate a plan for moving forward. Do you know what else can help? Investing in recruiting technology—68% of recruiting professionals say that the best way to improve recruiting performance over the next five years is by investing in new recruiting technology.

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is designed to help organizations organize, automate, and streamline their recruiting. Organizations utilizing an ATS report quicker hires, better hires, and an improved hiring experience. 94% of hiring professionals say that using recruitment software has positively impacted their hiring process.