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.

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.

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