Increased hiring is anticipated for 2025, recruitment industry suppliers cautiously predict, following a less than stellar 2024 that found employers delaying or curbing their numbers of hires.

But a few factors hint at a less than smooth journey for recruitment professionals even with more hiring ongoing, because of budgets that likely won’t increase to meet their needs and dissatisfaction around talent acquisition (TA) challenges generally.

As 2025 moves into full bloom, there’s less optimism around TA teams’ budgets to hire, Symphony Talent’s ‘2025 Talent Acquisition (TA) Outlook Report’ found. Symphony research suggests that 53% of organisations plan to increase hiring in 2025, with 41% saying they plan to increase the TA budget, but 30% expect to maintain flat TA budgets despite higher hiring volumes.

There’s also rising dissatisfaction within the TA ranks with current TA efforts, Symphony revealed in its report, citing an 8% year-over-year increase to 33% from 25%. The issues include systemic issues such as process inefficiencies, a high influx of unqualified candidates and limited technology usage to “enhance recruitment quality”, the report said.

According to Symphony, the most pressing recruitment concerns beyond budget constraints are manual/time-intensive processes (43%), misalignment with hiring managers (20%), outdated or inadequate technology (19%), lack of strategy (19%), all under the ‘resource and process’ banner. Under ‘talent and sourcing’, their concerns are the high volume of qualified candidates(48%), lack of skilled candidates (40%), candidates accepting other offers (32%), candidate drop-offs or ghosting (31%) and reaching the right target audience (31%).

Rec-tech company Gem reports that hiring has already started to come back with a “modest rebound”. This conclusion is one of 10 takeaways from its recently released ‘2025 Recruiting Benchmarks Report’, which covers data from over 140m applications, 14m candidates and 1.3m hires in identifying key trends shaping the recruitment industry in 2025.

Based on data from January 2021 to December 2024, the Gem report reflects the outcomes of significant changes in the recruiting landscape over the last few years, “making benchmarking crucial for [organisations] to stay competitive”, it says.

Here are the top 10 takeaways, identified and compiled by Gem’s SJ Niderost, from the report:

1. Hiring is experiencing a modest rebound, after a steep decline in 2023. Companies with fewer than 500 full-time staff saw the most significant relative increase in 2024, with mid-sized organisations also showing steady recovery, though slower than their smaller counterparts.
2. Recruiting teams are leaner than before. The average recruiter headcount per team dropped from 31 in 2022 to 24 in 2024.
3. Doing more with less is a reality. The average recruiter manages 56% more open job requisitions (14) and 2.7x more applications (2,500+) than three years ago. “AI and automation are key investments for teams looking to avoid burnout,” the report said. “As workloads continue to grow, utilising more technology is no longer optional – it’s critical for sustaining productivity and maintaining a positive candidate experience.”
4. Teams are taking longer to hire with more interviews. A 24% increase in average time to hire has developed between 2021 and 2024. Also, the percentage of interviews per hire has increased by 42% during the same period, the report found. “This makes managing candidate relationships more crucial than ever, as prolonged processes risk disengaging top talent,” Gem’s Niderost said.
5. ‘Post and pray’ is popular, yet inefficient. Job boards and social sites account for nearly half, or 49%, of all applications, but contribute to less than a fourth (24.6%) of actual hires.
6. Sourcing attracts the top talent. A sourced applicant is 5x more likely to be hired than an inbound applicant. “This underscores the value of proactive outreach and personalised engagement in attracting high-quality candidates,” Niderost said.
7. Talent rediscovery is the key to building deep, qualified pipelines. The proportion of hires that are rediscovered within companies’ CRMs or ATS has shown a “clear, upward trend”, from 29.1% in 2021 to 44% in 2024. This means that talent teams can accelerate hiring by starting their search within their existing database.
8. For candidates, getting hired is harder than ever. Candidate passthrough rates are lower at every stage of the funnel, partly because application numbers have outgrown the number of job openings. A prospective applicant is 3x less likely to get hired for a role today than three years ago.
9. Offer-acceptance rates are on the rise, suggesting a shift in attitudes. This suggests that candidates are more confident in job market stability and more selective in considering long-term career growth.
10. Mixed results in diversity hiring highlight ongoing opportunities. Women face lower passthrough rates at the top of the funnel but see greater success in later stages and are more likely to receive offers. Disparities across racial and ethnic groups are more nuanced, the report said. Conversion rates across all groups have dropped in recent years but considerable variability depends on the industry, department and other factors.

In the Symphony report, looking ahead over the next 18-24 months, 25% of TA professionals surveyed say that improving their reach to attract and connect with top talent is their top priority. At the same time, improving brand reputation and visibility is a top priority for only 8% with just 2% focusing on the improvement of brand visibility.

Finally, upskilling and reskilling existing employees was the top priority for 17% of TA professionals.

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