ScopeAT

Sometimes, to prepare for what’s in front of you, it’s helpful to look at what’s behind you. Recruitment is one of those industries where we quickly move into the rhythm of meeting the new year’s demands, missing the opportunity to retro the year that just concluded. 

Now I know there is limited value in retrospection — you can definitely spend way too much time doing it — but once a year it’s probably a healthy exercise to consolidate experiences so that we have a secure foundation upon which to build our thinking and our action for next year.

Here are five issues that shaped recruiting in 2024, based on cross-referencing Google search, ChatGPT, content from my newsletter Recruiting Brainfood, as well as my article focus on Open Kitchen, LinkedIn, X, and Facebook Group activities. (To see a more expansive take on 2024, click here, here, here, or there.)

Here are five critical issues that recurred repeatedly in 2024:

1. Talent acquisition teams get smaller

Smaller organizational size means less hiring, which in turn means smaller talent acquisition teams. The Talent Labs recently released a report that contains some interesting data, especially on team size and capability. For example, the report notes an increase of single-member TA departments, up from 68% to 71% year over year. 

This correlates with tons of anecdotal data collected via casual conversations last year: A great many companies have pared TA down to the bare bones, retaining perhaps a single recruiter to do the backfill hiring. My guess is that around 7 to 10 new hires per year might justify one TA specialist. So, depending on industry turnover rate, most organizations of 200 or so headcount might carry a single recruiter for attrition-based hiring.

Talent acquisition teams are becoming more efficient. We’ve seen a breakthrough in tech innovation that has unambiguously improved the capabilities of recruiters, especially in interview scheduling, interview note-taking, job description generation, interview question generation, scorecard generation, and the like. Improvements in these areas incrementally increase recruitment efficiency, producing better hiring outcomes for employers, while reducing the human labor that was previously required to create a similar result.

Is the future of talent acquisition a super AI-enabled solo recruiter, handling what seems today like an impossibly large req load, by coordinating a swarm of AI copilots to handle most of the operations? It’s a compelling vision and one which may not be unwelcome for the experienced ICs out there currently hanging onto remote.

2. The applicant flood

Anyone who published a job ad in 2024 can verify that it was a year of applicant oversupply.

Part of this is due to the wider economic condition, with the global economy not growing fast enough to absorb the aspirant workers out there. Early-entry talent 12 months after college graduation saw unemployment rates ranging anywhere from 5% to 30%, depending on where in the world they were.

Another part of this particular challenge is the globalized internet — where you are in the world no longer matters as far as applying for jobs is concerned. An unemployed person in Brazil is as able to apply to a job in Malaysia as any native of Kuala Lumpur might be. 

AI is, of course, also increasing the applicant flow rate. Our friends at Arctic Shores have been leading the conversation on the AI-enabled candidate, especially in early careers. It is what we can expect: year-over-year increase in the reported usage of AI to speed up the application process and increase one’s chances of passing the filters. 

Most relevant to the applicant flood is AI-personalized mass apply. One of the most interesting examples occurred in the middle of 2024 when a software developer from Italy open-sourced his code for producing a small piece of software that automatically created and sent a personalized application to a swath of open roles. From the reported 1,000 jobs this developer scraped and applied for, 50 converted to interviews, all through the click of a single button.

Now this software developer was talented, but not singular. So, the era of AI-personalized mass apply is here and we can be confident that the applicant flood will not be abating any time soon.

Surprisingly, this all may actually be good news for recruiters. 

Employers who are hiring will increasingly look for means of doing so other than advertising. This will create room again for direct sourcing, referrals, hiring in community, and the like. Another possibility is that recruiters will use AI to meet AI by turning to high-volume screening solutions, such as the ones developed by Maki. 

Recruitment work is increasingly moving from talent acquisition to talent verification.

3. Geographical job dispersal

One of the great ironies of hostile deglobalization on the national level is the enthusiastic reglobalization at the level of the firm. 

Who would have thought that making businesses more expensive to operate — increasing pressure to reduce costs — would drive jobs to places where they can be done more cheaply? 

And thanks to Covid, we’ve all now had plenty of training on how to collaborate with geographically distant colleagues. In 2024, we saw an acceleration of the trend of new job requisitions to be first considered for cheaper locations outside of the home country, so long as time zone and language remain aligned. 

Hiring for a software engineer? For U.S. employers, you’re looking first to hire for that role in LATAM and Canada; for the U.K., in South Africa; and for Australia and New Zealand, in the Philippines.

This is a win for employers who can secure top-quality talent at well below the market rates at home and — because they are usually paying well above market rate at the new location — they also tend to keep these dispersed hires for longer as they’re often fiercely loyal employees. For the employees, obviously this is also a great deal. After all, working for a premium salary in a remote job is what everyone thought they were getting before the timeline split in 2022.

The implication for recruiters and HR is significant; it means we need to be global talent intelligence advisors, able to recommend best geographies for the location of the job, based on what we know of skills distribution, working-age population, infrastructure quality, language fluency, cultural affinity, and legislative and geopolitical risk. 

We then need to get good at navigating all that and hiring efficiently for those roles. This is complicated, interesting, high-value work and should be a defensible moat against AI job elimination.

4. The rise of the freelance recruiter

The commitment of experienced individual contributors to a more flexible way of working is part of the energy that is fueling the continued rise of the Alt Workforce. Why come to conflict over RTO with a desired candidate or a valued employee, when you can solve the problem by offering a contract to someone remote who is not an FTE?

Interest in leveraging the Alt Workforce was a noticeable trend in corporate organizations even pre-Covid. Perhaps the Uber, WeWork, Airbnb era of SaaS convinced us of the superiority of utilization vs. ownership: Wouldn’t it be cool if we could access workers when we needed them, rather than go to the hassle of attracting, assessing, acquiring, managing, and maintaining them?

With Covid, hostile deglobalization, the shift to remote, and the rise of AI all signaling that existing systems are undergoing deformation (if not early stages of collapse), making organizations as agile as possible is going to be a business priority for the people departments in 2025. 

In plain language, this will mean lowering the ratio of permanent FTEs vs. non-FTEs going forward.

Expanding scope to take on the entire talent universe is a huge opportunity that we must embrace in 2025. But you know what? You’re going to need to cultivate talent communities, build employer brand, and leverage talent intelligence and network amplification from all workers who interact with your business, regardless of the precise parameters of the employment relationship you have with them.

We’re probably going to start at home base — with our own TA/HR departments. An unfortunate outcome of the global push for operational efficiency is that people teams have been among those departments disproportionately impacted by job losses; this has meant a surge of experienced and talented people thrust into an unforgiving job market, many of whom are now considering different forms of working relationships, even if FTE might be their preference.

5. Embracing change

Last year was tough. And this year promises to be tough too, particularly if we remain overly committed to what has gone before. Our personal responsibility to ourselves and our professional responsibilities to our colleagues is to lean into this change, even though these changes may be uncomfortable. 

To this end, I want to finish this post by citing a few talent community members who have shown us how to be courageous in the moment.

Damon Klotz, head of community at Culture Amp, announced his departure from this game-changing company in December. It’s hard to walk away from an organization that you’ve helped grow and in many ways become synonymous with. The strength of character to do this without the certainty of the next chapter augurs well for a future where decision-makers are going to be rewarded. Follow Damon — whatever he gets up to will no doubt also inspire.

Lars Schmidt ends the Redefining Work Podcast. Lars has been and will continue to be one of the great contributors to our industry. And while I mourn the loss of one of the best podcasts in our space, it is also a recognition that all good things must end. In an era where “data-driven decision-making” has become an article of faith, I really respect Lars for monitoring his motivation to keep doing the podcast. We are nothing if we cannot listen to our intuition: It might be the only thing which will continue to give us the human premium in an era dominated by AI.

Finally, Irina Shamaeva, legendary founder of Boolean Strings, announced her retirement from sourcing training in December. Irina is one of the key contributors in the sourcing discipline and no question helped distinguish it as its own professional identity. Irina, however, hasn’t gone away. She moves onto the next chapter as a digital artist who is converting her sourcing skills to prompt engineering that produces remarkably consistent AI-generated images.

Three different people, three different situations. But three examples of how to take charge of your future. 

None of us knows what is going to happen in the external world but I get the feeling that the winners in the next phase are going to be the ones who are determined to remain the main actor in their own stories. We’re living in interesting times — let’s embrace it.

Hung Lee is editor of the leading industry newsletter Recruiting Branifood.

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