From 2024 to 2025: Unpacking Hiring Trends with Hirewell

Hello, and thank you to everyone for tuning in to today’s episode of The Hirewell Update. I’m your host, Ryan Brown, Vice President of our Corporate Functions team, and this is my co host. I’m Emily Goor, Director on our Go To Market recruiting team. Before we kick off the show, you can find all of our content at talentinsights.

hirewell.com, or if you’d like to learn more about HireWell and our service offerings, check out our website, www. hirewell.com. We have a special guest today. Hello, Matt. Hello, ladies. How you doing? We’re great. Happy to have you on the show. It has been a minute, maybe like a year or so. I feel like it’s been a full year.

I think it’s been less, but you know, I don’t have to check the archives. I feel like it’s every six months, but it could be long. If we’re being technical, I feel like the last time we had you on, there was an eclipse. Because I remember making a joke about like Matt comes around as often as like a solar eclipse.

Yeah, we just, we really just need to google when the last eclipse was. Fair enough. Fair enough. We’re excited to have you. I guess. You need no introduction really, but like in case somebody is not familiar with Hirewell as maybe tuning into our content for the first time, will you just really quickly introduce yourself and tell the folks watching, uh, who you are?

Uh, absolutely. Uh, I’m Matt Masucci and founder CEO of HireWell. And, uh, I guess I’m lucky enough to join, you know, once or twice a year to just talk about some market trends and things that are happening at Hirewell. Yeah. And that’s exactly what we wanna talk about today. We know, um, you know, kind of wanted to break down just a wrap up of 2024 and then kind of talk maybe some predictions if we’re lucky for 2025.

Yeah. Sounds great. Awesome. So how did 2024 wrap up? What did, what did you see? You know, it was an interesting year. Um,. We, I think overall it was, it was solid, right? We, you know, started off a little slow, but as the year went on,

it continually got better. And, and so. Once we got our final numbers, pretty much across the board, it was up 10 percent from 2023.

Um,. But you know, it was a little deeper than that, right? We have a number of different divisions at Hirewell, so some were up quite a bit, some were down quite a bit. And, you know, we’ve talked about it a lot. It’s sort of been a tale of two job markets. So, you know, our real estate construction practice was up 26%.

Our go to market practice, as you’re very well aware, is up 24%. And then our, you know, corporate functions team, you know, Ryan, you’re also aware is also up 5%. So those, you know, we’re definitely strong. We trail our teams that were down, our tech practice has, you know, it saw a nice rebound as the year went on, but it was definitely, you know, still down roughly 8, 9 percent year over year.

And our industrial, one of our smaller teams was, was, you know, saw roughly a 5 percent decline. So, you know, a lot of interesting things. But you know, I think kind of, yeah, when I talk about like the, the tale of two job markets, ultimately like, you know, the way we look at it is, you know, there were companies who frankly had capital and the ability to invest and grow and then those that didn’t.

And so that was kind of a, a huge trend. And I’d say the second one was just companies across the board being focused more on efficiency. It’s kind of a weird thing to say because why wouldn’t every company focus on efficiency, but in the the tech world and you know in a world where Interest rates were zero money was free, you know efficiency wasn’t a priority and that came roaring back across the board Um, you know and kind of that the second point on that efficiency piece was just employee employees being asked to do more with less So it was you know, it was interesting a lot of different things happening .Absolutely.

It was an interesting year to say the least. I feel like, you know, post 2020, we’ve been saying every job market has been an interesting year. So we’re just going to keep it going into, you know, the fifth year, I suppose. But one of the things you mentioned Matt is, you know, employees doing more with less.

And I think an important question to ask is how they were able to do more with less and, you know, survive. And I think the answer to that is technology, you know, um, you know, Um, or working alongside colleagues that were, you know, sitting across the country. And I think, um, one of the more important questions for us to, to ask is how that applies to the recruiting world.

Um, and I think it’s been obvious, and we’ve seen this here at Hirewell, but, you know, across the job, job market in general, that the recruiters that have thrived in this market are the ones that have evolved. And so that’s, you know, through evolution, things that are happening or, you know, staying ahead of trends when it comes to industries or functions, really having a pulse on what’s happening, um, being able to truly add value to a process too, we’re no longer the recruiting world of just recruiters pushing paper and seeing results.

It’s really adding value and having a pretty big stake in the process and what it looks like. And then finally, you know, the the partners that have evolved into more consultative partners from a recruitment standpoint, um, you know, pushing back on hiring managers, really leveraging technology, creating the efficiencies that you mentioned, um, throughout the process to do things better, to do things faster, um, and also to do it without breaking the bank too.

So I think, um, you know, it’s obvious that these concepts apply to more than, you know, those of us that are in the recruiting space. I’m curious. So from the things that you had shared in terms of numbers, could you maybe just dive into those things a little bit deeper? Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, with each of the practices we, you know, we have saw, you know, kind of changes throughout the year.

So when we talk about our, our real estate and construction, you know, business, as I said, it was up year over year. But, you know, it’s kind of, it was pretty front loaded. Like that, that group does both hiring within the real estate world. So it could be developers, it can be people in the, you know, property management.

But you know, a big subset is, is construction and um, that was an area that was absolutely booming sort of early part of the year. And, and we saw a little bit of a slowdown kind of, you know, probably, you know, eight, eight or so months into the year. Um, things just kind of leveled off as, as time went on.

Well, and, and, you know, obviously go to market being up. Why don’t you talk a little bit about sort of what we saw there, what were the kind of the, sort of the subtrends within go to market hiring? Yeah. Yeah. And for those of you who don’t know, like our go to market, we have like sales recruiting and marketing recruiting most heavily under that umbrella.

I’d say it was pretty heavily skewed towards sales hiring. Um,. We’ve also seen, I’ve talked to a lot of clients about this recently, but a major uptick in customer success hiring. Pretty recent toward the end, I’d say of 2024. And now I know we’re not talking predictions yet, but spoiler alert, um, kind of heading into 2025.

Um, so yeah, huge uptick in customer success in comparison to little activity there in the previous like year and a half. Um, and sales hiring was up across all different industries. So. SAS and tech definitely came back online after a slower 2023 financial services and insurance hiring spiked a ton for us.

I know we kicked off like multiple engagements as well for high, high volume emphasis on the volume for sales hiring and like, meaning like 20 plus roles across a variety of different industries. Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, you mentioned the SAS market coming back. I mean, when, when you talk about tech or, you know, software companies, they basically two main functions, right?

There’s people to make the product, IE engineers, and then if people to sell it, salespeople. And so, so it’s been huge parts of what our, our business has been. Um, you know, that, that, that, that. The drop in on the tech side of things was, you know, largely in the engineering or kind of software engineers. I mean, I think for, for a point of reference at our peak in 2022, I think we placed 350 engineers in that year.

And I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think that, you know, it’s down roughly 40 percent from those numbers. So, you know, a pretty big, um, pretty big drop there. And, you know, we saw that to start to come back a little bit in 2024. But the interesting thing that we saw is. You know, while we’re, we’re based in Chicago and, and, you know, consider ourself, uh, you know, sort of U. S. or North American based company, we, we, you know, have expanded internationally over the last couple of years. We, you know, acquired Triton Exec that gave us, you know, operations in Europe and APAC. We’ve really seen a pretty big, you know, spike in, in offshore or near shore hiring for engineers. And so we’ve seen a lot of companies ask us to help build out teams in South America or APAC.

And that was kind of an interesting trend. I don’t think it’s necessarily a one to one correlation, but, you know, a lot of the, I think a lot of the demand has, you know, gone from hiring people in the US to hiring them elsewhere around the world. You know, I think Ryan, one, you know, we talked a little bit about sort of the trends within Corporate functions.

But like, you know, I think that you mentioned before the, you know, kind of the consultative need or, you know, the market shifting for recruiters and kind of being more consultative. But talk to us a little bit about like what you saw within. I know we saw a different sort of trend in hiring internal recruiters, but sort of a drop there as well.

Talk a little bit about the trends you saw there. Absolutely. Speaking of drops, internal recruiter hiring has definitely dropped significantly over the years. Clients just in general tapping us to help build out and or recruit, um, you know, for their internal recruiters was essentially non existent. In 2021, we placed.

You know, 105 plus recruiters and different talent acquisition professionals. Last year we placed five. That is a significant drop. We essentially fell off a cliff when it came to internal recruiter hiring. And, um, you know, we’re not, I know we’re not talking trends yet. Things are looking a little bit more promising just in Q1 alone than they did probably the entire year last year for recruiters.

So I’m feeling positive about that. I think there’s like, that’s a pretty good segue into like the, the trends component, um, what, you know, you mentioned while there was a pretty big drop off in, in companies tapping us to hire internal recruiters, like, you know, I know some of the stuff that you focus a lot on has been, you know, selling Exec searches, selling RPOs, but talk a little bit about the trends you saw, you know, in particular, kind of within your client base.

So our executive search and RPO business really started to accelerate in the middle part of the year. Our value prop has been and will be, you know, that we place leaders and help them build their teams. Unfortunately, our executive searches delivered, you know, it was. An all time low in 2000 and 23, but in 2024, we jumped up to, um, an increase of 71%.

So we had a total of 45 exec level searches, which was great. We also saw a big uptick in our RPO business. As you mentioned, Matt, this is an area I’ve been, you know, focused on in terms of selling for those that are not familiar with the RPO acronym, it’s recruitment process outsourcing. Um, think of these as multi month multi hire engagements where we’re really customizing to a client’s needs.

So companies have retained us to help them hiring from, you know, five to 50 plus people um, and some are part of very specific initiatives and other engagements. We’re running the entire hiring efforts for a company. So these are very, like highly flexible, highly customized recruiting engagements, incredibly hot right now.

Certainly something that we’re, we’re seeing a big uptick in, um, this year, um, in addition to last, um, I think some of the interesting numbers though, in 2023, we sold five RPO projects, which is, um. Frankly, not very good. Um, but in 2024, we sold over 20. So, um, 80 percent of those were in the back half of the year, which is, you know, certainly exciting.

Typically, that’s when things start to slow down, but it was really promising to see, um, those, uh, you know, pick back up during that time. You know, I think part of the reason for that is some companies, frankly, probably cut a little bit too deep when it came to their internal recruiting, they could not manage the uptick in hiring with their existing teams.

And I think others have just realized naturally hiring is not forever. Maybe building out, you know, these large scale internal recruiting functions is not the best case for the business. So, you know, that idea of hiring recruiters and then firing them again. Frankly, not sitting very well with, with organization.

So I think that’s where that RPO solution tends to be, you know, a really positive, um, positive value add for organizations looking to hire. Yeah, makes sense. I, you know, I think I have a lot more gray hair than I used to looking back at those 2023 numbers, but that’s sort of why, but, uh, you know, kudos to you and everybody else was able to sort of drive demand there.

So nice job. I feel like we’ve hit on something we’ve already started to allude to, like, what’s happening in 2025. So I guess the next question is just kind of where do we go from here? Like, what, you know, what does this mean for for 2025? Yeah, I think it’s a good question and, you know, my take it’s it’s and this is hardly a, you know, an outlandish one.

I think it’s gonna be a lot the same, like, where. The trends we started to see happening sort of, you know, back half of 2024, I think are just going to continue. Um, you know, there was so much sort of a slowdown in hiring. There was a lot of talk, if you think back like six, seven months ago, it was like the election was going to be the sort of the trigger point, but we actually saw things start to, you know, pick up ahead of that.

So I think in general, like there’s going to be, you know, the same trends happening where it’s not going to be full bore. Everybody’s hiring like crazy, not asking any questions, but I think there’ll be. You know, again, I, I never want to make any of this about politics, but I think without a doubt, like the changes we’ve had in Washington, you know, like companies or CEOs in general, like are just apprehensive to make decisions or to hire when they don’t know what the future is going to look like.

And unfortunately, we still don’t know what the future is going to look like, but there’s a better idea of what the next four years are going to be. And, you know, that’s going to impact some things. So, um, you know, that’s sort of the high level, I think, you know, what I think, I think we all kind of put together a few ideas.

You know, Ryan, I want you to lead off. What do you think is sort of your first prediction for 2025? Yeah, Matt, you mentioned that with the election, you know, things typically slow down a little bit and it didn’t really follow like the normal election, you know, period of time where things slow down, the election happens, hiring pick back, it picks back up.

Like you mentioned, it kind of happened before that. And so my opinion, companies that have put off hiring are definitely behind the eight ball at this. At this point, you know, quit rates are at a five year low, but employee sentiments are also way down too. And frankly, that’s not, I’m not amazing at math, but that’s not a really good combination of things.

Um, and as the market starts to, um, heat back up, I think we’re going to have to be prepared for a lot of turnover naturally. Um, plus, you know, there’s also, um, you know, more and more of the boomer generation are starting to retire. So how is that going to impact, you know, the, work. Um, we’re already seeing the effects of that quite a bit in our industrial practice too.

And, you know, what’s happening in one area typically starts to spill over into some other. So some things to be aware of. I’ll take the second one. I think, you know, the, the change we’re going to see or the kind of the trend we’re going to see continuing is people bringing on talents, um, in other markets.

Could be offshore, could be near shore. Um, I think that’s sort of the, you know, there’s on one hand you have this big push for return to office, but if you’re not going to have people return to the office or if you’re going to have people work anywhere, like you can really see way different kind of cost points by looking in different markets.

So I think that’s going to be something that continues to be an interesting trend. Um, you know, it’s one thing that we’re taking advantage of. We, you know, as we help clients hire in other markets, you know, we’ve leveraged, um, you know, kind of the folks from Triton with their team in India to help us. But we actually, you know, hired our first person, um, Miguel, who’s based in Europe.

And so he’s been helping us with clients in kind of a few different time zones, so it’s been a great addition and something we’re excited about. We see being a, you know, a pretty big trend going forward. Um, what about you, Em, you got a third prediction for us? Yeah, I feel like this is a bit of a cop out because Ryan and I talked about this and we’re going to continue talking about it, right?

Because I don’t think we’re going to stop talking about it. I think we’re never going to stop talking about AI. AI will be talked about a lot this year. Will it revolutionize recruiting? It feels like. You know, again, I don’t have a magic eight ball but feels like a year at least away. And let’s be frank like it isn’t all positive, it has almost completely ruined job postings, applying to jobs with AI customized resumes and just that

easy apply button, our fave. Um, it’s way too easy. So, and don’t even get me started about spam email campaigns. We won’t go there right now. But, um, yeah, we’re not going to stop talking about AI this year. It’s, I have a feeling we will not. No, it’s going to continue to be a big topic. I mean, not only with how it impacts obviously recruiting, but just AI positions in general and what that’s going to do in terms of the job market.

Um, a couple other predictions for me. So I, you know, I talked about consultative recruiters at the beginning. Those are the folks that are going to continue to win, especially in this market, the transactional ones that don’t add value, um, whether it’s to job seekers or hiring managers, they’re going to continue to struggle and you know, you can change, um, recruiters and.

You know plug in sales people and thoughts will still apply to that. So I think gone are the days of the transactional relationships. The consultative approach is definitely here to stay and um speaking of things that are here to say my prediction is that rpos and custom recruiting Um solutions are going to continue to Um, four weeks into this year alone, we’ve picked off two large scale RPOs, each that have 50 plus higher slated for them.

And we’ve got, you know, a ton of proposals out for several more. So I think that’s going to continue to be probably one of the biggest trends we see in recruiting this year. I don’t envision that there’s going to be this mass build internally of recruiting teams again. Hopefully we have all learned our lessons about.

Scaling and then and then firing and I think this is a really good alternative and obviously a great customizable solution. Yeah, and maybe a good segue, you know, if you’re watching and you do want to talk about custom recruiting solutions, get in touch with 1 of us. I know, you know, we’ll include our information in the

the caption or the comments or wherever, but definitely, definitely get in touch and on one more notes, by the way, we are hiring Hirewell is hiring our favorite thing to say, um, so if you’re an experienced recruiter who wants to sell and deliver a mixture of, you know, retain search and custom RPO solutions I feel like.

Should should have gotten a dime for every time we said RPO solutions today. Um, we’d love to chat. So again, reach out to one of us. We’ll include our information in the captions. But yeah, full desk recruiters higher. Hirewell is hiring. Hirewell is hiring. I think I said that maybe 1000 times, you know, in my career here. I love it.

It’s great to see you continue expanding. Yeah, James would be so proud. He’s his big goal is call to actions and all our content. And you ladies just knocked those two out of the park. Well done. not our first rodeo, I guess, but that’s just the only reason Ryan and I do this is we’re just trying to make James proud.

So Are we done? Is that it? We made James proud. So we can sign off. We’re good. We can sign off. We did it. Mission accomplished. But in all seriousness, Matt, I know we, we rarely get you on here. We really do appreciate it. We know you’re busy. Um, and we just, it’s great to have you on here. It’s fun to discuss kind of wrapping it up 2024 and what we might see.

We’ll revisit this. Like I said, we don’t have a magic 8 ball, but what I think is when Matt won’t be back. So we’ll do it. We’ll go back in the comments too. Okay. Well, thank you ladies. Thank you so much. That is a wrap for this week’s episode of The Hirewell Update. Thank you all so much for joining us.

As a reminder, you can find all of our content at talentalentinsights.hirewell.comf you’d like to learn more about Hirewell and our service offerings. Visit our website. It’s www.hirewell.com. We appreciate you guys joining. We’ll see you next time. Thanks everyone. Thanks.