5 stats that will change the way you think about hiring

Hello and welcome to #CuttheBS! Last week, we launched our annual report.

It explores the evolution of skills-based hiring in 2025 — unpacking the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the way we work and recruit. 

Whether you're a job-seeker navigating a changing market, a hiring manager rethinking talent pipelines, or simply curious about where the future of hiring is headed, this report is for you.

You can read the report here, but this week we thought we’d share 5 big stats from this year’s data that will change the way you think about hiring in 2025.

1 - 63% say it’s getting harder to find talent 🕵️

Hiring is getting harder – 63% of employers say so – and a whopping 70% of job seekers say it’s getting harder to find a job. 

We’ve got more hiring tools than ever at our disposal. Plus, it’s a tough market for candidates – unemployment in the UK, for example, is the highest it’s been in 4 years.

So what’s going wrong? Shouldn’t things be getting easier?

Well, these tools don’t exist in a vacuum. Skills are changing rapidly, and over half of employers say that determining if candidates have the right skills is the hardest part of their hiring process. Shocker – most of them are still using resumes as their primary screening tool (even though 89% of UK and 86% of US employers report having problems with them). 

To add more color to this, 59% of job seekers have trouble standing out from the crowd with their resume, and this percentage goes up to 61% for female job seekers. 

By choosing resumes over results, you’re making hiring harder for everyone involved.

2 - Over half of employers have removed degree requirements 🎓

Over half (53%) of employers have eliminated degree requirements. This is a 77% increase from last year, when only 30% had removed them. A significant milestone in the movement to put skills first, we think!

This jump directly mirrors the rising adoption of skills-based hiring practices: 85% of employers are using some form of skills-based hiring in 2025, and there’s a growing agreement that, for many white-collar roles, proven skills are more important than qualifications.

This data is a healthy indicator that degree inflation is easing as employers put skills first. 

3 - 1 in 3 employers who don’t hire for skills are unhappy with their hires 🥀

82% of employers who are using skills-based hiring in 2025 say they’re making quality hires. For employers who aren’t, this goes down to 67%.

By opting out of skills-based hiring, employers are giving themselves worse chances of finding great candidates. 

This speaks for itself. If you’re not hiring for skills already, what are you doing?

4 - Less than 40% use AI to complete job applications 🤖

Despite the fact that 7 in 10 employers report an increase in AI-generated job applications (and 73% say they’re easy to spot), only 37% of the job seekers we surveyed admitted to using them to apply for jobs.

This might be surprising to some employers. If you’re the kind of hiring manager who gets turned off by any whiff of an AI-generated job application, then think again, because you might be wrong.

The recent debate around em-dashes has shown how risky it can be to make assumptions about pieces of writing just because they have some of the trademarks of AI-generated content. After all, AI can only write like it can because it has studied human writing.

Recommended read: AI-generated resumes – The good, the bad, and the ugly

5 - 42% of job seekers report hiring bias ⚖️

Hiring bias is increasing. 42% report experiencing it this year – up from 31% last year and 21% in 2022.

This is concerning, and should urge employers to scrutinize their hiring processes for conscious and unconscious biases. Many employers have taken their foot off the gas with DEI initiatives following the DEI rollback in the US, but this doesn’t mean rising hiring bias is okay. 

In fact, 79% of the employers we surveyed said having more diverse teams is important to their company, and 84% say building an inclusive culture is a goal. This gives us hope – employers who care about diversity and inclusion will be more inclined to eliminate hiring biases.

There’s plenty more where this came from 👀

Head to the report for more data about hiring. You won’t find this kind of info anywhere else, plus we’ve built plenty of pretty pink interactive graphs for you to play with.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy the report.

To dig deeper, join our webinar! 📽️

In It’s not you, it’s your hiring process we’ll be diving deeper into the report’s insights with some of our experts. You don’t want to miss this.

It’s taking place later today – sign up here, or watch it on demand in your own time. 🎟️