Hiring numbers age fast. A cost per hire figure from a few years ago says little about the market you’re recruiting in today, and frontline roles move faster than most. That’s why every one of the hiring statistics below comes from a primary source, such as SHRM, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Statistics Canada, Gallup, Gartner and LinkedIn, and each one links to the original.
We’ve grouped the hiring statistics by the questions employers actually ask: what a hire costs, how long it takes, how often people leave, how candidates behave and where AI fits.
Hiring statistics at a glance
- Candidates who accepted their most recent job offer: 48% (Gartner)
- Cost of replacing a frontline employee: around 40% of their salary (Gallup)
- Monthly quits rate in accommodation and food services: 3.5%, against 2.1% for all private industries (BLS)
- U.S. employers reporting difficulty recruiting full time staff: 68% (SHRM)
- Median time to fill for nonexecutive roles: 39 days (SHRM)
- Cost per hire for nonexecutive roles: $5,475 on average, with a median of $1,200 (SHRM)
Cost per hire and time to fill
According to SHRM’s 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking report, the median cost per hire for nonexecutive roles was $1,200 in 2025, a 27% decrease since 2017. Executive hires moved the other way: their median cost per hire reached $10,625, up 113% over the same period.
The average is much higher. In its 2025 benchmarking announcement, SHRM put the average cost per hire at $5,475 for nonexecutive roles and $35,879 for executive roles. The difference comes from how each number works: most hires cost close to the median, but a few cost far more and pull the average up. Our SHRM cost per hire breakdown explains both figures in detail.
Speed has improved a little as well. The latest SHRM benchmarking update puts the median time to fill for nonexecutive positions at 39 calendar days. It also notes that nonexecutive costs stayed relatively stable, while executive cost per hire kept rising.
Recruiter workload is the other side of these numbers. In the 2025 report, organizations with dedicated recruiters said each recruiter managed a median of 20 requisitions a year, rising to 60 at organizations with 5,000 or more employees.
Keep in mind that cost per hire only counts what you spend to fill a seat. It doesn’t count what happens if that hire leaves. Gallup estimates that replacing a frontline employee costs around 40% of their salary. For a role paying $40,000 a year, that’s roughly $16,000 per early exit, nearly three times the average cost of filling the seat in the first place. For frontline teams, turnover is the number that matters.
How hard is it to hire right now?
Most employers still feel the squeeze. In SHRM’s 2026 Talent Trends research, 68% of U.S. HR professionals reported difficulty recruiting full time employees. Of that group, 53% said it had become harder than a year earlier.
In Canada, the picture is steadier. Statistics Canada counted 510,200 job vacancies in the second quarter of 2026, for a vacancy rate of 2.8%. There were 3.0 unemployed people for every vacancy, and the average offered hourly wage for open positions rose 2.0% to $28.55 (Canadian).
More unemployed people per vacancy usually means more applicants per opening. However, more applicants doesn’t automatically mean more qualified ones, as the candidate data below makes clear.
Turnover hiring statistics for frontline industries
The industries that hire frontline staff in volume also lose them fastest. The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey from the BLS, covering August 2026, shows hires and quits rates well above the private sector average in retail and hospitality. These are preliminary, seasonally adjusted monthly rates from the hires and quits tables.
| Industry | Hires rate | Quits rate |
|---|---|---|
| Total private | 3.6% | 2.1% |
| Retail trade | 4.3% | 3.0% |
| Professional and business services | 4.2% | 2.1% |
| Accommodation and food services | 5.2% | 3.5% |
The annual numbers tell the same story. Across 2025, accommodation and food services had a quits rate of 4.2%, nearly double the 2.2% rate for all private industries, according to annual JOLTS data. Retail trade averaged 2.6%.
Short tenure is common
Tenure data points in the same direction. According to the BLS Employee Tenure release, 20.6% of U.S. wage and salary workers had been with their current employer for a year or less in January 2026. Workers in leisure and hospitality had the lowest median tenure of any industry, at 2.4 years.
Attachment to the job is lower too. A Pew Research Center analysis found that 29% of blue collar workers thought it was likely they’d look for a new job in the next six months, against 23% of other workers. Only 43% said they were extremely or very satisfied with their jobs, compared with 53% of other workers.
If high churn is a constant in your industry, our breakdown of the call center attrition rate shows where the problem usually starts.
Candidate behavior: offers, ghosting and pay
Getting a candidate to yes is harder than it was. Gartner research found that 48% of job candidates accepted their most recent job offer in 4Q25, down from 54% in 4Q24 and 85% in 4Q23. In other words, more than half of those candidates didn’t accept their latest offer.
Ghosting is part of the same pattern. In SHRM’s 2025 Talent Trends findings, 41% of organizations said candidates were ghosting them during the interview process. Our guide to offer acceptance in volume hiring covers where candidates tend to drop out.
Applicants are also casting wider nets. A LinkedIn survey across 17 markets found that 37% of job seekers were applying to more jobs than ever but hearing back less. On the employer side, 73% of HR professionals said fewer than half of the applications they received met all the criteria listed.
Pay is now expected in the posting. As of May 2025, 59% of U.S. job postings included salary information, according to Indeed Hiring Lab data.
Engagement and the cost of turnover
Low engagement keeps the hiring cycle spinning. Gallup reports that 31% of U.S. employees were actively engaged at work in 2025, unchanged from 2024.
Plenty of those employees have one eye on the door. In the fourth quarter of 2025, 51% of U.S. employees said they were actively looking for a new job or watching for opportunities, according to Gallup’s workplace research.
What turnover costs
Replacing people is expensive. Gallup estimates that replacing a frontline employee costs around 40% of their salary, while replacing a leader or manager costs around 200%. The good news is that much of it is avoidable: 42% of employees who left voluntarily said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent it.
For a closer look at what keeps people in their seats, see our research roundup on why employees stay.
AI in recruiting
AI adoption in HR is growing, but it’s far from universal. According to SHRM’s State of AI in HR 2026, 39% of organizations have implemented AI in their HR functions, and another 7% planned to do so during the year. Where AI is in use, recruiting is the most common area, at 27%.
Recruiters are experimenting faster. LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 report found that 37% of organizations were actively integrating or experimenting with generative AI tools, up from 27% a year earlier.
Candidates, however, are wary. In a Gartner candidate survey, only 26% of job candidates said they trust AI to evaluate them fairly. Meanwhile, 39% said they used AI themselves during the application process, most often for résumé text and cover letters.
That gap matters. When both sides lean on AI, résumés start to look alike, and screening has to rely on more than keywords to tell candidates apart.
What these hiring statistics mean for volume hiring
Taken together, these hiring statistics point to a few practical conclusions for teams that fill the same frontline roles over and over:
- Speed matters at the offer stage, not just at sourcing. With fewer candidates accepting offers, a slow process gives them time to say yes to someone else.
- Turnover is the real cost driver. In industries with quits rates well above average, every early exit puts the role back at the top of the list.
- Applicant volume isn’t the problem, screening is. When most applications don’t meet the criteria, the work is in finding the few that do.
This is the gap Workwolf® fills. We handle sourcing, screening, candidate outreach and interview scheduling for businesses that hire frontline staff in volume, and you interview and hire directly. Workwolf® runs on its own AI engine, Packfinder. It screens and ranks every applicant against the profile of each client’s top performers, and it gets more precise with every placement.
If your team hires for the same roles every month, book a call with our team to see how it would work for your roles.
