A low unemployment rate and continued job growth – nearly 444,400 people joined the Australian workforce in 2024 – means that hirers need to work harder to compete for top talent. Data can help Australian recruiting teams determine where they need to deploy better tools and processes to meet the challenges of staffing in a scarce talent environment.
Recruiting Benchmarks Report: Australia
SmartRecruiters’ landmark 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks Report analyses key metrics across nearly 90 million job applications in 95 countries. This post highlights data from 2.4 million applications for roles located in Australia.
Benchmark recruiting metrics can help Australian organisations see where they fit into the global picture, determine whether their own metrics are leading or lagging, and decide which solutions to implement.
Here are the key highlights.
Applicant competition
- Australian organisations receive 11% fewer applications per opening than the global average across all industries, averaging 65 applicants per hire.
- Interview and offer rates are 55% and 66% higher, respectively, indicating that Australian employers are more willing to engage with candidates than their global counterparts. In other words, Australia is a good place to look for a job – and candidates know it, with candidates 5% less likely to accept their offers compared to residents of other nations.
- Australian hiring teams could potentially reduce the number of candidates interviewed for each role by using AI-powered screening tools that surface best-fit candidates more quickly.
Time to hire
- Not only is it easier to get a job in Australia, but candidates get hired faster: Australia has the lowest overall time to hire of the five countries measured, at just 32 days median time to hire. This is 16% faster than the global average.
- Australian companies break from their global recruiting counterparts in the interview to offer stage, where they’ve managed to cut 5 days from the process compared to the global average.
- Australian companies that want to speed up hiring even more could consider the use of AI-driven hiring tools; SmartRecruiters’ research found that the time to hire for organisations using AI is typically 26% faster than those that don’t use it.
Recruiter productivity
- Australian recruiters typically handle 53 hires per month, a whopping 78% more global average of 30.
- For Australian teams that use hiring scorecards, adoption lags, with just 88% of team members completing them. Hiring managers in Australia could potentially speed up hiring and ensure objectivity by using interview scorecards to assess candidates.
Sources of hire
- Australian employers lag in their use of referrals and internal hiring, with these organic sources of hire accounting for only 7% of hires, compared to the global average of 15%.
- To make up for lower-than-average applicant volume, Australian employers could invest in employee referral and internal mobility programs. These programs can improve retention, create employee goodwill, and prevent the loss of institutional knowledge.
Recruiting metrics highlights for Australia
Australian recruiters deserve commendation for managing workloads that are 78% higher than the global average. These recruiters have shown their dedication and resourcefulness in an environment of doing more with less.
Having proven their abilities to use SmartRecruiters’ best-of-breed technology to their benefit, these teams are soon to become supercharged with Winston, our AI recruiting companion.
By enabling candidate conversations throughout the hiring funnel, Winston Chat will reduce the need for transactional conversations so that hiring teams can have more of the conversations that matter. Additionally, Winston screening, matching, and recruiting companion tools will deliver a seamless hiring process that allows recruiters to deliver even more exceptional results back to their businesses.
Australian recruiting case studies
AI-driven hiring processes have already made an impact on hiring in Australia: Starbucks Australia enlisted SmartRecruiters and Sapia.ai to streamline high-volume hiring across more than 70 locations. The integrated solution saved recruiters 2 days of work per week and helped Starbucks Australia reduce new hire turnover by 56%. Read the story.
Aspect (Autism Spectrum Australia), a not-for-profit serving the Autism community, needed to modernise its recruitment practices across its 70+ locations. Using SmartRecruiters helped the organisation reduce hiring-related emails by 90% and reduce sourcing costs by 33%. Read the story
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.
