Average number of hires per recruiter report, Spring 2024

The average number of hires per recruiter was 3.9 for jobs opened between October to December 2023. That’s 54% lower than just one year previously.

To discover these trends, we analyzed data from more than 160,000 hires made by Pinpoint customers, across a wide range of company sizes and industries.

There are certainly many factors that can influence the average number of hires per recruiter, and our data team noticed certain niches within industries and regions that varied from the average.

However it’s impossible to ignore two other trends happening at the same time:

• Rising number of applications per hire
• Decrease in time to hire

So recruiters seem to be working harder for each hire by sorting through more applications, while also finding a way to move their successful candidate more quickly through the recruitment process.

You don’t need more applications, you need better ones

Check if your job board and social promotions are actually contributing hires—or just noise. Use reporting in your ATS to track hires by channel, not just candidates by channel. Experiment to see if more niche job boards or digital communities work more efficiently for you than the biggest, most popular job boards and social media channels.

Write more honest job descriptions that let the wrong candidates self-select out of your roles. The right job advert will repel 90% of candidates, says Glenn Elliott, co-author of Build It: The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement. But to the right candidate, it will sound like their dream job.

And finally, use knockout questions and automated rejection emails to filter out the wrong candidates more quickly where you can.

See our applications per hire report for more advice.

Improve speed to hire

If your competitors are reducing time to hire but you aren’t, you might start losing candidates to them.

The first step is to track how long candidates spend in each stage of the process to identify where your bottlenecks are.

Common challenges include:

• Getting bogged down at application review
• Losing time checking in on availability for interviews
• Too many steps involved in sending or signing offers

See our time to hire report for advice on how to speed up these stages.