There’s no sugarcoating it: Last year was a tough year for talent acquisition (TA) teams. Resources were stretched thin, layoffs hit the headlines, and the whole recruiting scene felt like a roller coaster.
At the same time, the labor market remains super competitive. As of this report’s writing, there were 8.8 million job openings in the U.S. and only a little over 5 million Americans seeking employment1. Candidates are still in control and companies must elevate their candidate experience if they want to compete for top talent.
But there is good news.
This is our third year publishing this report, and positive trends are starting to emerge: Hiring tech adoption is accelerating and while teams are getting leaner, they’re also evolving and becoming more resilient for the next set of challenges that come our way.
And the last few years of TA weren’t just about coping with challenges; they were also about us getting smarter and more creative in how we hire. We learned to do more with less using AI and automation. We honed our ability to spot top talent faster. We made our processes leaner and smarter. And for many of the TA leaders surveyed for this report, those actions are paying off.
At GoodTime, we keep our ears to the ground and stay closely connected to the experts. We surveyed over 500 talent, HR, and recruiting leaders across the U.S. to get the real scoop on what’s working and what’s not. This report is packed with their insights – real stories from the front lines, strategies that are changing the game, and a roadmap for hiring success in 2024.
The data and insights we gathered are more than just a reflection of the last year; they’re a guiding light for what lies ahead. This report isn’t just about numbers and trends; it’s about real experiences and expectations as we pursue the moving targets of talent acquisition together.
And this year, we’re bouncing back even stronger and smarter. Let’s make it happen!
In a year of complex labor dynamics, TA teams secured 51.3% of their hiring goals — a noteworthy improvement from the previous year, reflecting resilience in the face of a constricted labor market.
At the tail end of 2023, job openings in the U.S. decreased to 8.8 million (vs 10.7 million a year ago), hinting at a shift toward a less saturated market1. However, with only about 5 million Americans actively seeking employment, the competition for top talent remains intense, with 24% of TA leaders citing a lack of qualified candidates as a key challenge. The reality for TA teams is not a lack of effort or capability but a reflection of the current state of the market: a fierce battleground for high-quality candidates.
Teams are operating with further limited resources and often smaller headcounts, yet they are still expected to fill roles swiftly, and with outstanding candidates. This year’s slight increase in goal attainment suggests an adaptation to these stringent conditions.
The struggle to find qualified candidates was especially pronounced in the manufacturing and healthcare sectors, which ranked lowest in hiring goal attainment in 2023. Both of these industries face an escalating labor shortage with no end in sight soon2.
The technology sector saw a 12% lift in goal attainment in 2023, ranking highest for the second year in a row. But still, no sector broke an average of 60% goal attainment, showing that everyone was vulnerable to the hiring challenges of the last few years.
Talent retention broke out far and away as the top hiring challenge of 2023, cited by 34% of TA leaders. With 24% also observing a shortage of qualified candidates, the opportunity cost of replacing employees rises significantly. Not only must organizations invest more to recruit and train new hires, but they also face the added challenge of sourcing candidates who can meet the increasingly complex demands of today’s roles.
Other top challenges show companies still struggling to adapt to the new norms of work, including remote work compensation tensions, hybrid work challenges, and mismatches between candidates’ resumes and their actual skills. As the working world continues to evolve, it’s clear that traditional hiring practices are being tested.
And naturally, as pressures mount and hiring processes shift, TA teams feel more and more constricted by their current technology, with 22% saying their current tech stack limits their ability to hit hiring goals.
While the tech, retail, and financial services sectors’ top challenge was consistent with the broader struggle of talent retention, it was a different story for the sectors facing a labor shortage.
TA leaders in manufacturing said their top challenge was remote work compensation expectations. Michael Case, Global Head of Partnerships at Meshd, has led international recruiting efforts for some of the largest manufacturers over the past two decades. He says that the manufacturing sector is increasingly employing software developers, who are more likely to desire a hybrid or remote working model that doesn’t fit into the compensation frameworks that manufacturers have relied on for years: “More and more when you’re hiring for manufacturing, you’re hiring software engineers too. Every company is a software company now, right? And I think having strong processes for those kinds of candidates is actually something we can’t ignore.”
In the healthcare sector, TA leaders primarily struggled with the lack of qualified candidates this year, with 30% of them reporting it as a challenge in 2023 (compared to 23% in 2022). And this struggle will persist for the foreseeable future, with the U.S. projected to see a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 20343.
Retaining top talent was identified as a common challenge by TA leaders from every sector, begging the question: To what extent are TA leaders actually responsible for employee retention? Manjuri Sinha, Global Director of Talent Success & DEI at OLX, thinks TA leaders absolutely share in that responsibility, as it starts with being authentic and realistic in the hiring process.
“I think selling great things about an organization just to get that hire — those days are gone. Today, we have to be really realistic about things,” she tells us. “People would ask you questions or say, ‘We heard last year you had 15 percent layoffs.’ If that’s the case, be very honest about it.”
In addition, she says TA teams can bolster talent retention by making sure to hire the right managers, who have a major influence on the employee experience. In the current high-pressure market, she says it’s also key to prioritize candidates who can clearly demonstrate adaptability and resilience.
In 2023, companies made great strides in cooling an escalating time-to-hire, but 44% still reported that hiring is taking longer than it did in 2022.
While 45% said time-to-hire was flat year over year, only 10% were able to hire faster in 2023. That’s a huge lift over the 3% that accelerated time-to-hire in 2022, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
Brenda Purvis, Principal Consultant for Enterprise Talent Strategy at Kaiser Permanente, shares why her team is prioritizing time-to-hire: “Time is the element that we can have some control over. How do we make sure that we’re looking at our recruiting teams and equipping them to really reduce the time spent in all of those phases? Some of that is technology, some of that is procedures and efficiency and training, but it’s also trying out new things. So instead of three to four panel interviews, can we get those done in two?
Or, in certain roles where we have higher volumes and we really do know what it takes to be successful, could a recruiter make some of those hiring decisions? Those are all ideas that we’re trying out.”
Over the last year, talent professionals did a better job of leveraging technology to accomplish more with less and move faster. However, there’s still a long way to go. Teams continue to spend a significant amount of their time on repetitive, tedious, administrative tasks that can be easily automated.
Compensation struggles represented two of the top five key challenges this year. Nearly a quarter (24%) of TA leaders cited remote work compensation and unrealistic compensation expectations generally as hindering factors in hitting hiring goals.
Candidates see soaring inflation watering down their paychecks and have an expectation that switching roles will secure them a salary lift as it has in previous years, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore. In fact, wage gains are smaller than they’ve been in nearly three years4. This puts a responsibility on recruiters to set clear expectations upfront, even if it means letting go of an otherwise qualified candidate.
If you poked around LinkedIn in 2023, there was a clear perception of an “employer’s market.” Every job posting seemed to have thousands of applicants, employers asked candidates to jump through more hoops, and candidates complained of being ghosted. It would seem employers had an embarrassment of riches with a sea of great talent waiting to fill their open positions, but that’s not how TA leaders felt.
When asked how the hiring landscape has changed in the past 12 months, 44% said it had become more competitive due to an increased demand for talent. Even in sectors like technology, where the number of experienced candidates may seem vast, employers are competing to hire the same limited pool of A-players who can keep up with the increased pace and leaner resources of today’s environment.
Employers in the U.S. announced plans to cut over 686,000 jobs between January and November of 2023 — a 115% increase in layoffs from the same period the previous year5.
This shows a seemingly paradoxical challenge, particularly in sectors like healthcare. On one hand, TA leaders report a lack of qualified candidates as a top hiring difficulty. On the other hand, the same organizations are among those most likely to conduct layoffs, a decision often driven by budget constraints, shifts in demands, or organizational restructuring. This suggests that while there is a surplus of candidates due to layoffs, the specific qualifications and experience required for open roles are still in short supply.
Compounding TA leaders’ challenges is the fact that layoffs can have a major impact on employee morale and engagement, which can escalate the already top-of-mind talent retention struggle.
The years of increased layoffs have had a clear impact on employee morale. Companies that experienced layoffs in 2023 were about 83% more likely to report fair or poor engagement from employees.
In addition, nearly one in five (19%) companies that conducted layoffs in 2023 cited mental health and wellness concerns as a top challenge their employees faced this year.
Recruiting teams are particularly overrepresented in layoffs6, and 43% of the companies we surveyed said that an increase in recruitment team turnover has impacted their ability to keep their candidate pipeline moving.
The good news is that layoffs seem to be letting up a bit in terms of severity. We found that the companies that did conduct layoffs in 2023 generally made smaller cuts than in 2022.
The top focus area TA leaders identified in the past 12 months was upgrading hiring technology (38%). Most of the remaining focus areas speak to the problems they looked to solve with that technology, including improving overall efficiency (37%), increasing personalization (36%), and improving candidate experience (35%).
In terms of the type of tech TA teams looked to implement, there was a clear focus on automation (35%) and AI (32%).
When it comes to improving overall efficiency, Monika Warchol, Senior Manager of Global Talent Operations at OneStudyTeam, reminds us that while tech and automation can be major drivers of improvement, it’s crucial to bring the process into the mix as well. “It’s about determining what the core problem is and then finding the shortest distance between the problem and the answer. And the answer looks different depending on what the problem is. Sometimes it’s a tool. Sometimes it’s cutting a step out of a process, or even cutting a team out of a process, or a combination of things,” she tells us. “It’s important to start by getting crystal clear on the core problem. Lean on your data to identify where the bottlenecks really are in your process and go from there.”
AI isn’t just coming — it’s here. As recruiting teams were challenged to make the most of limited time and resources this year, they embraced AI and automation, focusing on the low-hanging fruit — repetitive, tedious, and mundane tasks. They also took tasks that are highly templatized, like creating interview questions, and let AI turn templates into near-final deliverables.
99% of the leaders we surveyed said their teams used some form of automation or AI in the past 12 months. And most did so with the goal of limiting ‘administrivia’, as Jonathon Wall calls it. Jonathon is the Founder of Cassillon.AI and a seasoned recruiting leader with over two decades of experience. More recently, he has focused on helping companies use automation and AI to hit their goals.
“We should be leveraging automation and AI to do those things that aren’t fun,” he tells us. “Recruiting is a very defined process and a lot of the what I call ‘administrivia,’ it’s the stuff that recruiters don’t like… They kind of keep us from doing the things that really are our superpowers. We’re people people. The message I would give is to leverage all of those tools so that you can have higher-quality human interactions.”
In 2023, nearly every company reported that their hiring teams reached out to candidates via text message or WhatsApp.
And most companies (52%) are doing so through a centralized platform or text recruiting software. That’s good news because when recruiters text candidates from personal cell phones, or even from a company-provided phone, major compliance risks and process inefficiencies enter the chat.
Let’s double-click on some more of the top factors affecting the hiring world this year — from the state of return-to-office (RTO) efforts to where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) sits as a priority for TA leaders.
The somewhat surprising, but clear theme from the last year is that candidates are still king. 46% of TA leaders reported the need for a renewed focus on candidate relationships. In addition, 42% say it has become more important to connect with candidates quickly, and that more touchpoints are needed than in previous years.
At the same time, 43% of the companies surveyed have felt the impact of higher turnover within their recruitment teams, posing challenges to maintaining momentum in hiring processes. It’s the same struggle we’ve heard across the board from TA leaders — the necessity of achieving more with fewer resources.
The RTO push ramped up in 2022 with a rocky start that saw many employees resisting or even ignoring mandates. As a result, it seems companies are letting up a bit and compromising with mixed or hybrid working models. In 2023, TA leaders reported a massive shift from a fully in-office workforce to a mostly in-office approach, with a mix of fully in-office, fully remote, and hybrid workers.
While 6% of companies said they were mostly remote, only 1% said their company identified as fully remote.
This mixed structure is more likely to effectively balance senior leaders’ desire to have employees collaborating in person with many employees’ hopes to retain the work-life balance gains they saw in the fully remote days of 2020 and 2021. And the approach seems to be working to resolve some RTO tensions, as employees are increasingly open to, or even in favor of hybrid working options over a fully remote model7.
In last year’s report, we shared that 28% of companies planned to make DE&I a measurable priority in 2023, but this year’s report shows that only 24% followed through on that goal. Overall, the number of companies prioritizing DE&I has fallen two years in a row now.
What’s even more concerning is that DE&I is likely to be deprioritized further, with only 24% saying it’s a focus area for 2024.
While you would be hard-pressed to find a TA leader who thinks DE&I isn’t important, the reality is that many are failing to prioritize it against all the pressures they’ve faced in the last few years. But it’s worth it to carve out the time and resources needed to build a diverse and equitable organization — not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because 78% of the workforce says it’s important to them8.
With dedicated DE&I resources dwindling as companies look to operate as leanly as possible, Manjuri Sinha, Global Director of Talent Success & DEI at OLX, shares that there are some simple, but impactful things leaders can implement into day-to-day hiring processes to keep diversity a priority.
“We have to get innovative. Begin with talent attraction. We look at research that says women do not apply to positions unless they see that they match 100% with the requirements listed,” Manjuri says. “We check for bias of language with an AI-based augmented tool.” She shares that since implementing revisions to the tone of their job descriptions, OLX has seen an initial improvement in their candidate pipeline.
Manjuri also calls for standardization in the hiring process as a way to prioritize DE&I and prevent hiring managers from making gut-based decisions: “We don’t want to have something where a hiring manager comes back and says ‘I have a good feeling from the candidate’ or ‘I didn’t have a good feeling from the candidate.’ We use a process of competency-based interviewing.” She says that every hiring manager needs to know what they’re assessing — whether it’s functional competencies, leadership behaviors, or something else. It should never be left to interviewers and hiring managers to determine how to assess a candidate on their own.
When asked what challenges they anticipate in 2024, TA leaders again pointed to talent retention as their top answer. Many also believe that tensions will persist with employees and candidates around hybrid/remote work, compensation, and mismatches in skills.
The top anticipated challenge varied by sector, with manufacturing leaders pointing to a persisting struggle in candidates’ preference for fully remote work. And interestingly, TA leaders in financial services said they anticipated candidates no-showing to be a top struggle in 2024. While healthcare leaders anticipated an overwhelming number of applicants, a lack of qualified candidates was a close second, indicating they’re spending a lot of time processing unqualified candidates whose skills don’t meet the basic requirements of a given position.
There is good news on the talent retention front. The percentage of Americans voluntarily quitting their jobs sits at a three-year low of 2.2% as of November 20231 (the latest available data as of this report’s writing).
And 73% of U.S. workers said they are planning to stay put in their current roles9, even as pressures rise to return to the office.
Today’s recruiting teams are prioritizing candidates’ time by offering efficient scheduling options (54%), automated candidate-driven interview scheduling (51%), and convenient rescheduling options through an online platform (50%). Automating interview scheduling isn’t just better for your candidates — it’s more convenient for your interviewers as well. And with TA leaders saying their teams spend 35% of their time scheduling interviews, automating this task could give them back more than a whole day per week to focus on higher-value work.
That time back is especially valuable right now as a smaller number of recruiters are tasked with more work, says Mike Joyner. Mike has over 15 years of experience leading recruiting operations for companies like Apple, Facebook, and Pinterest. Now, as a Founding Partner at Growth by Design Talent, he leverages that experience to help organizations optimize their recruiting efforts. “In the last year, we’ve seen companies reducing their recruiting coordination teams, and in some cases eliminating the team entirely. This has put more of the administrative burden on full-cycle recruiters that now really need automation in order to do their job,” he tells us. “They’re going to accomplish less if they take on tasks that unnecessarily burn time, like scheduling or initial reach-outs. If you don’t automate some of those higher volume tasks, recruiters simply aren’t going to be able to hire as many people given the finite amount of time that would be available for higher impact recruiting work.”
Aside from scheduling, teams are prioritizing transparency in the interview process (52%), making the process as fast as possible (49%), and offering perks like transportation or lunch on interview days (46%).
The only way TA teams can know if they are hitting their goals is if they’re measuring their performance properly. We asked which metrics they’ve got their eye on in 2024.
Far and away, quality of hire was the most important, with a quarter of companies saying it’s their number one performance metric. And while surely every TA leader would say that quality of hire is important, it’s not as straightforward to measure as, say, application completion rate.
So how do you measure quality of hire? Craig Pyke, Director of Talent Acquisition at Rivian, recommends starting simple with data you already have: “You can look at attrition within the first 90 days as one indicator of quality of hire,” he shares. “And when you combine exit survey data of why that they’re leaving with the factor of them attriting within 90 days, you can really start to pinpoint if that’s a TA challenge or if that’s a challenge somewhere within the business. That’s super, super important.”
We like that Craig’s approach measures quality of hire as a function of talent retention, addressing the top challenge TA leaders pointed to in 2023. After all, the right hires will certainly stick around past their probationary period, and the wrong hires will churn and leave your team back at square one.
But what about the other metrics? Skyla Lambeth, Recruiting Operations Manager for Collective Health, laid out a simple starting point to help reveal efficiency gaps from your current data: “It’s crucial to monitor time-to-hire data. Pay close attention to pass-through rates, understanding how many candidates are required at the top of the funnel to make a job offer. Additionally, it’s vital to assess how many candidates successfully progress from the on-site stage or panel interview, especially when multiple people are involved in the interview process.”
Let’s get into the data you can use to win in 2024. We’ll start with a peek at what other TA leaders are doing, then we’ll focus just on the top performers to see what they did differently and what they’re focusing on this year.
As of the end of 2023, over half (51%) of companies were automating interview scheduling, contributing to the significant reduction we saw in the amount of time recruitment teams spent scheduling this year (from 42% in 2022 to 35% in 2023).
Let’s examine this against data from our platform, GoodTime, which automates all aspects of interview scheduling, from candidate communication and availability collection to new interviewer training, performance tracking, and reporting.
GoodTime users taking advantage of the platform’s auto confirm feature achieved an average time-to-schedule of just six days in 202310, which helped them realize an up to 86% reduction in time spent scheduling11 and a 50% reduction in time-to-hire12.
And that time savings can make a major impact on a team’s ability to achieve their goals.
TA teams that automated interview scheduling saw a 13% lift in hiring goal attainment in 2023 versus those that didn’t.
Global enterprise organizations face unique challenges from growth-stage companies, so for this section, we’ll focus just on insights from companies with 5,000 employees or more. The data below represents responses from 228 TA leaders at enterprise companies.
Enterprise organizations on average achieved 53.8% of their hiring goals in 2023. That’s higher than the 51.3% average for all organizations, but still well off target.
Larger companies didn’t fare much better in the talent retention struggle than anyone else, and the rest of their challenges were largely consistent with the other survey respondents.
Enterprise organizations were 61% more likely to conduct layoffs this year than other organizations. The vast majority of those layoffs (69%) were relatively small (9% of the workforce or less) compared to the more dramatic layoffs we saw in 2022.
Speed, efficiency, and candidate experience were top focus areas for enterprise TA in 2023, supported by efforts to upgrade or better leverage technology.
Enterprise organizations made great strides over the past 12 months, but they still see room for improvement, starting with building on the areas they found success in last year.
Enterprise organizations prioritized communication with candidates via SMS and WhatsApp, and gave their teams the tech to do so. They were 23% more likely than other organizations to utilize a centralized platform to communicate with candidates via text message.
In tech, the competition for specialized talent remained high. The increase in hiring goal attainment suggests that tech companies are becoming more adept at leveraging the same automation tools that they develop and market. It seems the tech sector is not only rebounding, but also reshaping its strategies to attract and retain the high-caliber professionals essential for hyper-growth.
41% of tech companies are grappling with retaining top talent, a challenge exacerbated by the complexities of hybrid work expectations and compensation demands.
Tech TA leaders are bracing for additional hurdles in retaining top talent and adapting to the new norms of hybrid work environments as the sector continues to reel from the shifts of the last few years.
Tech leaders are looking to use AI and automation to carve out more opportunities for a human-centric, personalized hiring experience.
Financial institutions are increasingly harnessing sophisticated analytics and AI-driven recruitment tools, a proactive evolution that underscores the sector’s growing agility. Leaders are clearly revolutionizing their recruitment playbook to secure the financial experts pivotal for driving economic innovation and stability.
The challenge of keeping talent on board was magnified by rising compensation expectations and the complexities of hybrid work environments.
With 30% of finance companies bracing for candidates not showing up, there’s an underscored need for robust candidate engagement tactics.
Finance companies are set on refining their recruitment strategies, with 44% focusing on standardizing the hiring process to achieve consistency and quality in talent acquisition.
The healthcare sector faced deepened labor challenges in 2023. As healthcare organizations seek to navigate a path through persistent labor shortages, the importance of streamlining hiring processes and improving the candidate experience becomes even more paramount to attract the necessary skilled workforce to support an ever-strained healthcare system.
TA leaders in healthcare faced an escalation in scarcity of qualified candidates, as 30% identified it as a top challenge in 2023, marking a sharp rise from 23% the previous year.
The healthcare sector anticipates a dual challenge: managing an influx of applicants while grappling with a continued scarcity of specialized talent.
Healthcare TA’s focus in 2024 is on refining recruitment processes with 42% aiming to improve efficiency and 35% seeking to enhance candidate experience.
The manufacturing sector saw a stable hiring goal attainment year-on-year as they maintained their recruitment efforts in the face of global supply chain disruptions and a shifting economic landscape. To break through this plateau, manufacturers may need to explore new recruitment strategies, invest in skills development, and embrace technological advancements that can streamline their hiring process.
In the manufacturing sector, the past year has been defined by a challenge in compensation models, particularly regarding remote and hybrid work. Following closely behind was a struggle with limited hiring tech.
The top anticipated challenges are tied to the shift to remote and hybrid work, while simultaneously striving to retain top talent and navigate a tight labor market.
The manufacturing sector sets its sights on enriching the candidate journey in 2024 to increase offer acceptance rates.
This notable increase suggests that retail companies are successfully adapting their hiring strategies to meet the demands of a rapidly changing market. This improvement is particularly encouraging as it reflects a sector responding dynamically to evolving shopping behaviors and the competitive labor market, positioning itself to attract and retain the talent necessary for retail’s next-generation growth.
In retail, a whopping 45% of companies cited retention as their foremost challenge, reflecting the sector’s focus on navigating the complexities of hybrid work and ensuring alignment with evolving candidate expectations.
44% of retail companies will aim to improve overall efficiency in 2024, with a significant focus on upgrading hiring technology (36%) and optimizing automation (34%).
This report would not have been possible without the constant conversations we are privileged to have with our community of TA experts. We want to give a special shoutout to those featured here, who shared their experience-backed insights with us throughout the year in enlightening Executive Roundtable discussions and one-on-one conversations.
This report was developed with scientific rigor in partnership with Qualtrics. We began by identifying the population of interest. Qualtrics distributed the anonymous survey to HR leaders, from Directors to C-suite executives. We had 1,825 respondents attempt to take the survey. 266 respondents were terminated either by the security check (either registered as a duplicate or a bot), or for belonging to a category filled, deeming them as an “over quota respondent.” 997 respondents were terminated via pre-screening, and 37 respondents were removed by the data scrubs. In this case, 525 completed the survey. We developed the survey questions according to best practices in survey research, ensuring they were clear, concise, and understandable to people with various backgrounds. Questions had response formats designed to balance the richness of data to be collected with the ease of responding. We selected the topics based on a set of research questions identified by subject matter experts as relevant to emerging trends in the hiring landscape amidst the current economic and hiring conditions. Together, these actions encouraged participant engagement and high-quality responses while collecting in-depth information about changes in the hiring landscape.
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