Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals
March 6, 2013 

How does an organization’s size and industry affect its hire-to-recruiter ratio? According to results from NACE’s 2012 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey:

• There is a near linear relationship between organization size and the number of hires per recruiter. (See Figure 1.) The range goes from an average of 25 hires per recruiter for firms with 500 or fewer employees to more than 100 hires per recruiter for firms with more than 10,000 employees.
• The only break in the pattern throughout these employer categories is that recruiters at organizations ranging between 10,001 and 20,000 employees average more hires (142) than do recruiters at organizations with more than 20,000 employees (108).

The hire-to-recruiter ratio by industry ranges from a low of slightly less than 40 hires per recruiter in the retail sales sector to a high of nearly 120 hires per recruiter among pharmaceutical firms. (See Figure 2.) Some of this differential is related to the size of the companies in the industries.
 

NACE’s 2012 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey was conducted June 15 through August 15, 2012; 242 employer-member organizations took part. Read the executive summary here.