On a regular basis, GBD conducts a series of benchmark surveys to help Talent Leaders with data and insights to make better informed decisions, influence internal leadership and stay abreast of market trends. Topics include:  talent team goals, compensation, and diversity strategies and tactics.  Participants receive a summary of findings along with more granular anonymized results to compare against your company size and stage.

At the end of each year, we launch a benchmarking survey on Recruiting Productivity and Operating Metrics focused on recruiting team ratios, recruiter productivity, req loads, time to hire, diversity recruiting goals/tracking methods, cost per hire, and quality of hire. It’s been a tumultuous year for recruiting teams, so we were interested to see what has changed and what has not.

Top takeaways:

• Recruiting team size as a % of the company has decreased by 30% since this time last year with the biggest impact to sourcing and recruiting ops teams. Recruiting teams at companies at all stages are now between 1-3%. This is a stark difference from five years ago when recruiting teams at mid-sized growth tech companies were 5-7% of the company, late stage 4-6%, and recently IPO’d public companies were 1-2%.
• Recruiting productivity has trended down 30% for technical recruiting and 5% for business recruiting. Early stage companies have ticked higher, mid to late stage companies have gone down, and public companies have trended lower as well. We have several ideas about contributing factors: different set of companies participating in the survey itself vs last year, fewer roles to fill overall, higher bar for quality, increasing applicant volumes, and a move away from pipeline hiring due to rapid shifts in hiring priorities and majority of roles being one-off and heavy backfills.
• Cost per Hire & Quality of Hire are still not widely measured. 3 in 4 companies don’t measure either of theseCost per hire continues to be a difficult metric to implement in practice given the variation of definitions and lack of a standard industry method or centralized source for collecting relevant data. Measuring the quality of hire continues to be an aspirational metric for teams that want to measure it or ‘have plans’ to do it, but haven’t started. If you want to learn more about how to get started, here is a recording of a recent community event we hosted about quality of hire (passcode: A#Y6TL3$).
• Time to hire remained flat year over yearTalent leaders have been telling us that their offer acceptance rates have been really high vs prior years, which is likely a contributing factor to this. Given a lot of focus on backfill hiring, hiring managers are also very motivated to fill the role since it is likely critical work that has had to be absorbed by others on the team until a role is filled. Finally, with fewer roles to fill, there’s a sense of urgency from recruiters to demonstrate value.

Here is a summary of the results. To gain access to the granular anonymized results, you can participate here.