Introduction:
The Great Resignation is upon us. Its impact on the job market and the broad economy is massive. How is this larger trend affecting the demand for recruiters, whose jobs lie close to the center of this national story? A recent Wall Street Journal article shared that recruiters are some of the hardest jobs to recruit for today. Forbes cites the hot demand for recruiters. LinkedIn data shows soaring demand for recruiters.
Recruiter.com regularly appears on CNBC and other outlets to discuss its Recruiter Index, a gauge of recruiter sentiment and to offer insights on the job market on the whole. To add color and context to these recent headlines on the increased demand for recruiting professionals, Recruiter.com partnered with Revelio Labs to provide exciting, detailed data-backed trends and analysis.
Please see data and insights below. Interviews are available with Evan Sohn, CEO of Recruiter.com, to discuss further. Contact Nicole Gallina at ngallina@recruiter.com to schedule an interview. You may also direct any data inquiries to Reyhan Ayas, Economist at Revelio Labs at reyhan@reveliolabs.com.
Recruiter.com is a recruiting solutions platform that solves hiring challenges for employers from startups to the Fortune 100. With sophisticated AI sourcing software and on-demand recruiting professionals available to help, Recruiter.com flexes with changing hiring needs. Learn more at Recruiter.com. See recent press coverage at https://go.recruiter.com/recruiting-experts.
Revelio Labs is a workforce intelligence company. Founded in 2018, Revelio Labs absorbs and standardizes hundreds of millions of public employment records to create the world's first universal HR database. The company's team of data scientists, economists, and engineers deliver valuable workforce analytics to customers including investors, corporate strategists, HR teams, and governments, empowering them to make actionable, data-driven decisions. Learn more at www.reveliolabs.com.
Recruiter roles have far outpaced other roles at public companies, growing by over 120% since 2008. There was a sharp decline during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in this growth. However, growth has increased over the course of the year during 2021. This is likely influenced by the high need for hiring across all industries, and the reliance on recruiters to drive the hiring process.
Most interestingly, we can see that this enormous growth in recruiter headcounts in 2021 is primarily fueled by hiring rates. Although attrition rates of recruiters have increased in 2021, hiring rates have increased at a much greater magnitude. The data demonstrates that recruiting recruiters was a big focus in 2021.
With the backdrop of the large increase in the hiring of recruiters, it is important to explore the professional backgrounds of these new recruiters. When we look at the previous roles that these recruiters held, we see that they most commonly held other recruiter positions. Human resources specialists and sales associates are other roles from which workers commonly transition into recruiting roles. In other words, recruiters are now most commonly moving from one recruiting role to another recruiting role, highlighting the need for focused skills and experience.
These findings pose an important question for the recruiting industry. Are recruiters becoming more specialized? As we track the share of newly hired recruiters whose previous role was also in recruitment, we see that this share has been steadily increasing since 2009. But, this steady increase cannot compare with the stark increase observed during 2021. This trend leads one to believe that recruiting is evolving as a career field and becoming increasingly specialized.
It is also important to take a closer look at the skills of today’s recruiters. Tracking how the skills of recruiters evolved over time, we can see that since 2018, HR-specific skills have been surpassed by management skills. These two skill groups are the most common for recruiters. Although recruitment is still one of the most common skills, this reversal of the incidence of management and HR-specific skills could signify a shift in the expertise necessary during this time of immense growth.
Using historical job postings data, it can be observed that the average time to fill recruiter roles increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the average time to fill has returned to pre-pandemic levels since.
As would be expected, we see an increase in salaries for recruiters during 2021. This is in line with the increased demand for these roles.
Metropolitan Statistical Areas with the highest and lowest number of postings for recruiter roles in 2021 are as follows:
Industries with the highest and lowest number of postings for recruiter roles in 2021 are as follows:
Please see data and insights below. Interviews are available with Evan Sohn, CEO of Recruiter.com, to discuss further. Contact Nicole Gallina at ngallina@recruiter.com to schedule an interview. You may also direct any data inquiries to Reyhan Ayas, Economist at Revelio Labs at reyhan@reveliolabs.com.