Future-Proofing Your Talent Strategy: Using 2023 Benchmarks to Build a Stronger 2024

Setting hiring benchmarks means combining what the market says with what internal data actually shows, and knowing how to turn both into decisions hiring managers will act on. Two talent acquisition leaders, one from a health tech company and one from a global gaming studio, break down how they build and use that data.

• Benchmarks come from a mix of sources: paid survey services, free tools like levels.fyi, Glassdoor and Reddit, comp data purchased from reporting firms, and conversations with departing employees and industry peers.
• Internal actuals often matter more than external averages once a team has enough history: tracking pass-through rates, time to fill, and offer accept rates by role and hiring manager builds a more reliable baseline than industry surveys alone.
• Much of this data collection is still manual, even at large, established organizations. The fix is not waiting for a perfect system but working with an HR program manager or analyst to automate what can be automated while still acting on what's available now.
• One team traced a stalled requisition back to a mismatch between the stated candidate profile and reality: the job called for three years of experience, but a look at recent hires showed the team was actually made up of people with five to seven years. Presenting that gap to leadership, with the data laid out visually, sparked a full job-family review.
• Migration data, tracking where hard-to-fill candidates came from and where they went after leaving similar roles, helps sourcers get ahead of persistently difficult searches rather than repeating the same strategy each time.
• Bringing data into intake and kickoff meetings, not just performance reviews, gives hiring managers a clearer, faster path to decisions and builds credibility for recruiters and sourcers in those conversations.
• Sharing these same insights with individual contributors, not only managers, raises the level of every conversation a recruiter or sourcer has with a hiring team.

The consistent theme is balance: no single source of data is sufficient on its own, and the right mix shifts depending on the role, the year, and the organization. Treating benchmarks as a compass rather than a fixed answer is what keeps a talent strategy adaptable as conditions change.