New Data Shows a Soaring Demand for Recruiters and Where You Can Find More of Them

If you’re struggling to hire recruiters right now, you’re not alone. 

Employers around the world are having a hard time filling roles, period. The U.S. unemployment rate hit a 14-month low of 5.8% in May 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Companies are hiring quickly as the pandemic wanes in some countries, and the scramble is emphatically increasing the need for recruiters.

Amy Schultz, the global head of talent acquisition for the Australian software maker Canva, wrote in a recent post: “As of right now, there are 364,970 ‘Recruiter’ jobs advertised on LinkedIn worldwide. For comparison, there are 342,586 ‘Software Engineer’ roles open on LinkedIn worldwide.” 

Our latest research underscores that the demand for recruiters is happening at scale, across industries, and around the world. Recruiter job postings on LinkedIn have steadily increased since the beginning of the year and have now surpassed pre-pandemic levels. The data show changes in where recruiters are coming from and what they value most, so check out the insights below to better attract and engage them.

Recruiter job postings surpass pre-pandemic levels

The graph below shows how recruiter demand remained steady throughout 2019, then fell sharply between February and April of 2020 when the pandemic hit. Many companies slowed or stopped hiring, so recruiter jobs fell far below 2019 levels.

As 2020 progressed and the world saw signs of recovery, recruiter roles increased and hiring picked up again. In April 2021, recruiter jobs surpassed pre-pandemic levels. While all jobs on the platform have seen incredible growth this year, recruiter jobs have grown faster than the job market overall. The demand for recruiters, of course, also serves as a bellwether for hiring across all functions.

Comparing January to June 2021 to the same six-month period in 2020, we see a nearly 3x increase in recruiter jobs posted. When we look at June 2021 vs. June 2020, there are almost 7x more recruiter jobs posted.

The share of recruiters hired from other recruiting jobs has nearly doubled

One reason the shortage may feel so acute is that companies aren’t hiring recruiters from outside of recruiting as much as they did before the pandemic. In other words, they’re increasingly competing for the same narrow set of candidates.

Before COVID, only one-third of recruiters were coming from other recruiting roles. But since COVID, that share has jumped to 59%. Partly, that’s due to the large number of recruiters who were laid off last year and were available this year as hiring in talent acquisition picked up. And during a mad scramble for talent, there’s a tendency to stick to hiring people who require less training. As LinkedIn’s senior director of talent acquisition Erin Scruggs says, the current hiring pace makes it more challenging to hire outside of recruiting because it takes time to bring newbies up-to-speed with recruiting-specific hard skills. 

Recruiters now come more often from HR, less often from sales 

To isolate recruiters’ previous roles further, we removed recruiting from the analysis. We found that recruiters hired in the past 14 months have come less often from functions like sales, administration, and marketing and more often from within HR. There was a 10% increase in the share of recruiters coming from HR and a 24% decrease coming from sales, for example.

Companies are relying more on the surer bets who can ramp up quickly. HR professionals, already moving in the world of talent management, may be seen as the closest thing to a recruiter.

New recruiters can still be found in a wide range of roles

Talent acquisition aside, the rest of human resources accounts for the dominant share of recruiting hires. But new recruiters are also coming from roles such as account manager, administrative assistant, and salesperson.

Your next star recruiter may be an executive assistant or store manager right now — looking for adjacent skills in these other areas may help address your recruiter shortage. Many of these folks already know how to build relationships, how to influence, and how to create a narrative. They may need training in how to recruit, but many of their other skills translate well.

Recruiters today are more likely to care about job security and company mission 

While work-life balance, compensation, and company culture are still the most important priorities for recruiters when they’re considering a new job, we see an interesting shift in preferences over the past year. Job security jumped 21% as a priority for recruiters when job hunting, followed by purposeful mission, which rose 19%. Recruiter candidates may be especially receptive to outreach that is mission-based or addresses job security.

Other job factors that have become more important since COVID began: having influence over tasks and priorities (+11%) and challenging work (+9%). 

Final thought

It’s good news that recruiters are in high demand, but companies may be limiting their talent pools unnecessarily in an effort to meet it.

It’s true that companies will be able to get veteran recruiters up to speed faster than newbies. But companies that hire from outside talent acquisition and HR may gain that time back — and then some — simply by finding recruiters faster.

Methodology

Demand for recruiters and other roles is based on global LinkedIn data on all premium job posts. The most in-demand jobs are those with the highest number of job posts. Analysis of recruiting professionals covers a range of titles, such as “Recruiter,” “Technical Recruiter,” and “Talent Acquisition Specialist,” within recruiting. To determine which functions and specific roles those recruiters were “hired from,” the analysis looks at those currently in a recruiting position and considers their most recent previously held position at a different company, as listed on their LinkedIn profile. 

For this analysis, “pre-pandemic” or “pre-COVID” means before April 2020, while “since COVID” or “during the pandemic” includes data from April 2020 to June 2021. April 2020 was chosen as the starting point because it is the first full month after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

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