Recruiters Express Optimism for 2025

The past year was a strange one for many recruiters, who reported both an abundance of candidates for open roles and not enough qualified candidates to fill those positions. 

At the same time job seekers claimed they couldn’t get the attention of employers looking to hire, fewer people quit their jobs and job openings fell, among other signs of a sluggish hiring environment. 

But recruiters’ stress levels in 2024 remained about the same as the year before and much less fraught than the immediate post-pandemic years, according to Employ Inc.’s annual Recruiter Nation Report.

Employ is a talent acquisition software and services company in Denver and the parent company of JazzHR, Jobvite, Lever, and NXTThing RPO. The Recruiter Nation Report is based on an analysis of recruiting data from over 22,000 Employ customers and a survey of 1,200 talent acquisition professionals conducted by Zogby Analytics in September 2024. 

Similar to the findings from 2023, a little over half of recruiters (54%) find their job more stressful today than the year before, but that number had been as high as 65% in 2022. And, looking forward, fewer recruiters believe that hiring in 2025 will be as challenging compared to previous years, with 92% saying they are optimistic about hiring in 2025.

That optimism could be because of findings that show employers have made efforts to improve the hiring process. These efforts include incorporating artificial intelligence and automation technology into the process and providing what candidates are looking for, such as increased salary offers and flexible work arrangements, said Stephanie Manzelli, chief human resources officer at Employ. “The net is that the more flexible the hiring process, the less stressful it is for hiring teams, which ultimately increases productivity,” she said.

“I think there is a belief among talent acquisition professionals that hiring will be turned back on in 2025, after a pullback on hiring the last couple of years when business leaders were worried about the economy,” said Tim Sackett, SHRM-SCP, a recruiting industry veteran and author of The Talent Fix, Vol. 2 (SHRM, 2024).

Josh Rock, talent acquisition manager at Nuss Truck Group in Rochester, Minn., is betting on the pace of hiring picking up. “An improved jobs market will lead to a revitalization in hiring, and companies will get back into growth mode,” he said.

Some employers will feel the pinch of having dismantled their recruitment teams in 2023 and 2024, he added.

Specifically, Rock will be looking to hire diesel mechanics, a hard-to-fill occupation. “We expect to see a surge of hiring for diesel mechanics and a resurgence of truck salespeople as well,” he said. “It has taken a long time for the truck manufacturing supply chain to catch up, and we are primed for a boost in truck sales.”  

Erin Stevens, SHRM-CP, senior talent acquisition specialist at Fortune Brands Innovations in Deerfield, Ill., said she’s cautiously optimistic about hiring this year. “Recruiting tends to be cyclical. The beginning of the year comes with new budgets, and people are excited to spend money. It’s always go, go, go. New roles come open and recruiters are excited to fill those roles,” she said.

Stevens reflected on hiring in 2024, describing it as up and down. “The last half of the year was rough. There were a lot of unknowns. I feel like a lot of businesses were waiting for the presidential election to be decided.”

Recruiting Challenges Met by AI, Automation

According to the Employ survey, the most significant recruiting challenges businesses faced as 2024 wound down included competition for talent from other employers, not enough people to fill open positions, and too many candidates applying for open positions.

Respondents also indicated that not being able to offer remote or hybrid work, poor communication from candidates in the hiring process, and not being able to compete on salary requirements were top challenges their companies faced when hiring.

Manzelli said that the contradicting difficulties of not having enough qualified candidates to fill open positions and simultaneously having too many applicants for those roles illustrate the skills mismatch in the labor market and underscore the importance of skills-based hiring.

Sackett said that two things are driving this dilemma in recruiting: Technology allows people to apply to more jobs than ever before and, at the same time, there is a misalignment between those who are unemployed and the skills that are in demand.

“It’s been shown that candidates are applying to jobs within seconds, which isn’t humanly possible,” Sackett said. “Candidates are also using AI tools to match their resumes to the job description, so matching technology is struggling to differentiate between them. If AI writes resumes for our jobs and matches jobs to our candidates, we are going to end up with way more candidates who look amazing but are most likely not that amazing. The only way we’ll find this out is to conduct an amazing job interview. This is why I believe interview intelligence technology will be the HR technology that takes off in 2025 and 2026.”

AI can help with these recruiting challenges, Manzelli said. “Technology can help recruiters get through a high volume of applicants quicker and easier while searching for quality,” she said.

Jason Pistulka, assistant vice president of talent acquisition at HCA Healthcare in Nashville, said that his team is very keen on automation to advance processes but is hesitant when it comes to AI. “We’ve tried to be diligent in where we consider the use of AI, balancing effectiveness, efficiency, legal risk, and candidate experience impacts, before launching these tools,” he said.   

Assessing recruiters’ conversations with candidates is one area where HCA is using AI. “We use AI to record and transcribe candidate conversations during phone screens and offer calls,” Pistulka said. “The AI creates notes and assesses the conversations to see how well the recruiter is conducting these conversations, with the goal being to help close the skills gap between our junior and senior recruiters.”

Stevens said that AI helps her work better and faster. “AI has made sourcing candidates easier. It helps with tailoring candidate outreach, rewriting job descriptions and ads, and researching job duties for unfamiliar roles,” she said. “All this saves time. The admin work of recruiting is what slows a lot of us down.”

Key Recruiting Benchmarks

The Recruiter Nation Report includes a section on recruiting benchmarks for the year, which talent acquisition teams can use to compare with and improve on their own performance. 

Metrics that stand out for 2024 include the average number of applicants increasing from 2023; the interview-to-offer ratio remaining relatively flat; and the average time to fill open roles falling by a full seven days, from 48 days in 2023 to 41 days in 2024—a significant drop.

“Companies that embrace flexibility and adopt technologies that automate and streamline processes will continue to see decreases in time to hire,” Manzelli said.

Sackett agreed that the adoption of recruiting process automation tools, such as on-demand interview scheduling and conversational AI technology (recruiting chatbots), significantly reduces time to apply and time to interview, especially for front-line, high-volume roles.

“Time to fill is also drastically reduced by the ability to source so much faster than just a few years ago, when it was more manual,” Manzelli said.     

As a leader in a smaller organization—about 400 employees—Rock is much more interested in quality of hire and tenure of hire. “We want to hire the best talent versus just putting butts in seats,” he said. “We have an above-average tenure rate for diesel mechanics. That tells us that we are winning.”

Rock takes part in as many exit interviews as possible to find out why someone is leaving and whether there is anything that can be improved in the organization as a result. His team measures quality of hire—which can be an elusive metric—by employees’ growth in skills, procedural abilities, and completion of master certification training programs.

“We also track repair work quality—when a repair is done, does that truck come back to us? The fewer comebacks, the higher the quality of work,” he said.

Stevens relishes candidate and hiring manager feedback as a valuable metric. “I want to know what I can do to improve service,” she said. “Even when I reject someone, I will give constructive feedback and then ask them what they think we could do better in the hiring process.”