Peter’s note
We spent the last two weeks pulling the hiring data from the past year into one page. The numbers come from Greenhouse, Ashby, LinkedIn and Gartner. What’s interesting is that they agree on more than I expected: twice the applications per job, a heavier load on every recruiter, and longer to fill. The one I keep thinking about is the recruiter’s load. Applications per recruiter more than tripled between 2022 and 2025, and companies ran with 56% fewer recruiters. The full set, with every source, is on our site. This issue is the short version.
The Short List
The volume
Greenhouse looked at 640 million applications across more than 6,000 companies. Applications per job went from 116 in 2022 to 244 in 2025, and time to fill rose about 37%. Recruiters still made more than twice as many hires a month in 2025 as in 2022.
Fewer conversations
Ashby’s numbers land in the same place from a different angle: three times the applications per hire since 2021. The line I’d underline is the other one. Candidates are about half as likely to reach an interview as they were five years ago. More people apply, and fewer of them get a conversation.
The applicant side
LinkedIn CEO Dan Shapero stated that job seekers send 30% more applications than before the pandemic, and that hiring teams now live in “a sea of applicants” who look pretty similar. Candidates use AI to apply at scale. You can’t fix that from the employer side. You can decide what you read first.
AI hiring
74% of U.S. job seekers use AI, 41% admit to hiding text in their applications to get past AI filters, and only 8% of job seekers believe AI makes hiring more fair. The last number is a problem for every company selling AI into hiring, ours included. Candidates trust a process they can understand. VeraHire ties every score to something the candidate said, so the hiring team sees the reasoning behind each one.
The offer stage
48% of candidates accepted their most recent offer in Q4 2025, down from 85% two years earlier. Gartner ties the drop partly to candidates being reluctant to switch jobs. The same release says 30% of candidates are open to AI-led interviews, and only 31% knew in advance they’d be in one. That’s the gap Greenhouse showed in Issue 01, when 70% said no one told them upfront. To me, the first conversation has to earn its place: short, about the job, and clear about what happens next.
Pull last month’s applications for your highest-volume role and count how many nobody read past the first screen. With 244 applications per job, the honest answer for most teams is “most of them.” Pick the requirement that matters most for that role and ask every applicant who meets it one question about it, before anyone opens a resume.
End note
This data won’t tell you which candidates you missed. Your process decides that every time a resume sits unread at the bottom of a pile. If your team could talk to everyone who meets the bar, who would you hire that you’re passing over today?