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.
- 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.
As we close out the year, we want to thank and acknowledge our GBD talent community members. By most accounts, it has been one of the most challenging that any of us have seen in our careers. We’ve been heartened by the resilience and positivity that you have all shown and blown away by how this community has come together to support one another. And GBD will continue to be here for you - whether it is supporting you in the request to “do more with less”, helping you transition to a new role, or connecting you with peers to collaborate and commiserate. We are very optimistic for 2024 - please don’t hesitate to reach out about how we can partner together next year.
We are tracking recruiting leadership moves in the market. Here are the ones announced this past month.
- Sean Cervera has joined Cruise as their Head of Inclusive & Equitable (DEIB) Recruiting, Partnerships and Talent Programs
- Jack Connors, former Director, Global Eng Recruiting at Datadog, has joined Snyk as their new Director, Global Talent Attraction
- Joy Osborne is the new Recruiting Manager, University Programs at Snap Inc. Previously she was Director, University Talent Engagement at Zwift
- Jason VanDiver has joined General Motors as their new Global Head of Technical Talent Acquisition. He was previously the Senior Manager Technical TA for Roku Inc
- Erin Symons Drooks, former Head of Business Recruiting at Plaid is the new Head of Talent at Candid Health.
- Freddie Montgomery has joined Pathstream as their Corporate Recruiter. He was previously at Greenhouse as their Manager, Global Candidate Planning & Experience
- Christoper Chalek and Chinsin Sim have joined Anthropic’s Talent team.
- Jeremy Galossi has joined Character.AI as a Technical Recruiter. He was previously a Lead Technical Recruiter for Instabase.
- Tony Riggins has joined the TA team at PRIME.
- Joe Vo started a new position as Senior Manager, Technical Talent Acquisition at Fastly. He was previously the Recruiting Manager at Zillow Group.
- Elizabeth Shober Smith started as Head of Talent Acquisition at Natron Energy. She was previously VP of Recruiting at Udemy.
- Shea Jones has joined Tapcheck as a Lead Recruiter. She was previously a Sr. Recruiter at Splunk
- Priscilla Stickel, previously at Meta, is now at Lucid Motors as their TA Manager.
- Katrina Powell has joined ChartUp as their new Head of TA. She was previously HubSpot’s Director of Recruiting.
- Brandon Sligh has returned to Hover Inc. as their Head of Talent. He was most recently Talent Director at Sequoia Capital.
- Robert Gonzalez is Fabric’s Sr. Manager of Recruiting. He was previously at Robinhood as a Sr. Manager, TA.
- Bryan Kaye has rejoined Meta as a leadership recruiter for Software Engineering Agility.
- Pradeep Desu, former Head of Talent at Gojek, has joined Zamp to build all things ‘Talent.’
- Kevin Le, former Tech Recruiting Manager at Amazon is joining Helion as a Sr. TA Partner.
- Heather Torres has joined the Executive Talent team at Sequoia Capital. She was most recently Head of GTM Talent at Y Combinator.
- Siobhan Palermo is Vanta’s new Head of Talent. She was previously Director of Tech Recruiting at DoorDash.
- Joe Dinkel is joining IC2 Talent Acquisition Solutions as a Founding Partner. Joe was previously at Flexport as their VP, Global Head of Recruiting.
- Jess Weber, previously Interim CEO at Creatively, has joined Prelude Growth Partners at their Head of Talent.
- Chris Middlemass has joined Nova Talent as a GTM Talent Partner. He was previously Director of TA at CaptivateIQ
- Charlie Gray, Founder of Gray Scalable, is now Managing Director at Hub Recruiting.
- Shannon Harrington joined Balderton Capital as their Portfolio Network and Talent Advisor. She was previously a Senior Technical Recruiter at Abnormal Security
Did we miss your career change? Let us know: hello@gbdtalent.com
