The first half of 2025 marks an uncertain time for hiring in the United Kingdom. Global economic unpredictability and post-Brexit turbulence have left the UK economy charting new global pathways. Domestically, minimum wage increases, tax hikes, and higher National Insurance contributions have left UK employers with higher employee costs.
Amidst all this uncertainty, UK hiring teams have the opportunity to streamline hiring with more efficient practices. Benchmark recruiting metrics can help UK organisations see where they fit into the bigger picture and develop plans for improvement.
Recruiting Benchmarks Report
For its landmark Recruiting Benchmarks 2025 Report, SmartRecruiters examined nearly 90 million applications for 1.5 million jobs across 95 countries. This blog post dives into data from 8.9 million job applications in the UK.
Here are the top takeaways.
Applicant conversion
- Employers in the UK receive an average of 72 applications per role, on par with the global average.
- Candidates are slightly more likely to get interviews but less likely than those in other nations to proceed to the offer stage. And when they get the offer, they’re slightly less likely than average to take it.
- The fact that UK employers are interviewing more candidates than average to get to a decision suggests an opportunity to apply AI-based screening technology to identify best-fit candidates faster and reduce time spent interviewing.
Time to hire
- The median time to hire in the UK is 40 days, just above the global average. Candidates progress to the review and interview stages at about the same pace as their international counterparts.
- The time to hire for organizations using SmartRecruiters’ AI is typically 26% faster than those that don’t use it. By applying AI to their hiring process, UK organisations could fill positions faster and help their recruiters achieve more hires per month. In Australia, for example, recruiters across all industries are making 53 hires per month.
UK recruiting productivity
- Recruiters in the UK make an average of 28 hires per month, slightly fewer than their counterparts in other industries.
- Scorecard adoption is high among companies that use them, with 98% of hiring teams completing them.
- For teams that are faced with doing more with less, conversational AI can help fill the gap and increase recruiter productivity. Winston Chat, SmartRecruiters’ candidate chatbot, can handle both top-of-funnel candidate conversations plus screening and scheduling. Together, these features support an 80% reduction in manual work for recruiters.
UK sources of hire
- UK employers exceed internal mobility, generating 25% more hires from internal sources than those in other countries.
- UK-based companies are on par with the global average for referral-based hiring.
- CityFibre, a UK-based telecommunications company, increased its proportion of internal hires and referrals to 40% by using SmartRecruiters’ Employee Portal to engage employees.
UK recruiting metrics implications
Industry-related data from the Benchmarks Report shows that there is no one right way to hire: one company’s short time to hire (e.g., a retailer) may be impossible for another company (e.g., a technology firm). As the economic headwinds shift seemingly every moment with tariffs, geopolitical conflicts, and immigration changes, UK employers need AI-driven technology that supports agility regardless of external conditions.
Recruiting teams have the opportunity to further develop their creativity, relationship-building, and strategic thinking skills as they hand off rote tasks like candidate screening and interview scheduling to AI-driven technology. With technology’s help, UK-based hiring teams are poised to rise to the occasion and chart a new course in a changing world.
UK recruiting case studies
Frasers Group, a UK-based retailer and intellectual property group with more than 1,500 stores, used SmartRecruiters’ automated workflows and AI-based screening to streamline its hiring processes for 20,000 hires per year. With careful data-driven oversight and the application of templated branded communications, the company reduced time-to-hire to nine days from 23 with 25% fewer candidate drop-offs. Over time, Frasers needed 50% fewer ads to make the same number of hires, and new hire churn dropped by 50%. Read the full case study.
Colliers, a global commercial real estate firm, wanted to streamline and standardise hiring practices for its EMEA division based in London. With SmartRecruiters’ easy-to-use system, the firm identified hiring bottlenecks and improved hiring manager engagement. The combined efforts yielded less dependence on agencies (fewer than 7% of hires) and improved first-year retention by 25%. Read the full case study.
Get more recruiting benchmark metrics
Download the full report to get a global overview of hiring benchmarks plus insights on industry-related differences in hiring across healthcare, retail, hospitality, manufacturing, and technology.
