Engineering Hiring Trends: How Senior Leaders Slash Time-to-Hire Beyond 2025
2025 Engineering Hiring Trends: How Senior Leaders Slash Time-to-Hire
In 2025, the companies that win are those who don’t just hire more – they hire smarter. For senior engineering, operations, IT, and technical leadership, we speak to clients on a daily basis about their hiring needs, trends, and current process challenges. Time and again, we’re met with the pressure to: do more with less, hire faster, and avoid mis-hires that cost time, money, and morale.
As a leader in these domains, here’s what you need to know – and what you can act on – to make your next rounds of hiring a strategic advantage.
The Context: Hiring is slowing, costs are rising, and mistakes are expensive
Across global recruitment benchmarks, the signal is loud: time-to-hire is creeping upward. Gem’s 2025 report shows teams now conduct 42% more interviews per hire than in 2021, contributing to an average 24% increase in time-to-hire over that period. Gem: In the UK specifically, the average time-to-hire sits around 4.9 weeks (≈34 days) across the technology industry.(source)
Because hiring is slower, many hiring efforts can now carry hidden costs – delays in project execution, higher agency fees, or the risk of losing top candidates mid-process. In fact, 60% of companies reported their time-to-hire increased in 2024, with only 6% managing to reduce it. (source)
Meanwhile, the stakes of making the wrong hire are also mounting. SmartRecruiters notes that only 15% of leaders feel totally confident in their hiring decisions at the time they hire. (source) That means most organizations second-guess and adjust later, which often leads to churn, rehiring, and wasted time, money, and effort.
So, the question for senior leaders is: “How do I hire fewer, but more impactful, workers – faster and with less risk?”
What “impactful hires” look like beyond 2025 (and why they matter)
Rather than focusing on volume, the top 20% of your audience (senior/engineering/operations) should prioritise roles that move the needle. Critical hiring projects such as Change & Transformation, AI integration, or updating legacy systems are costing companies millions in potential revenue and time inefficiencies, so hiring correctly for these projects is crucial to see a return before a projected fix becomes an even larger cost burden.
Based on current trends, here are the hires that tend to yield outsized returns:
- AI / ML / Data Science engineers: As AI integration scales across products, firms need engineers who can go beyond feature-building to architecture, model deployment, and optimization. We identify AI, ML, and data engineer roles among the top-demanded technical positions in 2025, and who we advise you start with for related projects that are behind schedule. (source)
- DevOps / Infrastructure / Cloud Engineering: The backbone roles that enable rapid delivery, scalability, and robustness. Those who automate, containerize, and monitor systems reduce friction and accelerate feature velocity.
- Green / CleanTech / EV / Energy Systems Engineers: In sectors tied to sustainability and energy transition, skills in battery systems, power electronics, autonomous controls, and conversions are in short supply. Kelly Services predicts that semiconductor, Hyper hyperscale data centers, and heavy industrial manufacturing & engineering roles will remain high-pressure hiring priorities. (source)
- Technical Program & Delivery Leads: People who can coordinate large-scale, cross-disciplinary projects, removing blockers and aligning engineering, ops, and business stakeholders. Their value is often multiplicative.
Because these roles are strategic, they justify investment in sourcing, evaluation rigor, and candidate experience. Done well, they pay off in performance, retention, and downstream ROI.
5 Trends Shaping How You Hire in 2025 (and what senior leaders must lean into)
1. Skills over credentials.
The hiring landscape has shifted decisively toward skills-based recruitment. Emerging and future-focused technical skillsets such as AI, Digital infrastructure, and other emerging disciplines are in massive demand. So much so that formal degrees are no longer the gatekeepers they once were. Research shows that degree requirements dropped by 15% across AI, cybersecurity, and sustainability roles, whilst the ability to prove technical skills commands up to a 23% wage premium.
What to do: Replace rigid degree filters with demonstrable capability checks – coding interviews, micro-credential verification, or real-world simulations.
2. Flexibility isn’t a perk — it’s a baseline.
Over half of all engineers now work remotely, and 72% say they’re open to fully remote opportunities. Hybrid models are not just preferred; they’re expected. (source)
What to do: Design roles around hybrid or distributed frameworks. Benchmark compensation for both on-site and remote talent to stay competitive.
3. The rise of the flexible workforce.
Permanent positions are still favored by the working majority in the current job market – but project-based work is on the rise. Companies that can facilitate a variety of employment contract options will have the advantage, as they can secure key long-term talent and also ramp up project work quickly with freelancers and contract teams
What to do: Build a hybrid hiring model. Keep a curated bench of contractors, consultants, and interim leaders ready for rapid deployment alongside your permanent team.
4. Utilize established recruiters with niche networks
Companies using talented recruitment partners are seeing improvements, not only in time to hire, but also less churn and better attrition metrics by negotiating with pre-vetted candidates who are motivated to join and create impact.
What to do: Introduce a roster of recruitment consultants who have connections and experience in placing these critical hires within your competitors.
5. Interview fatigue is killing candidate engagement.
The number of interviews per hire has increased 42% since 2021, and every additional stage raises the risk of candidate drop-off. (source)
What to do: Streamline your process. Run technical, leadership, and culture interviews in parallel and lay out the predicted hiring process and length as soon as possible to all candidates. Give fast feedback and clear next steps to keep high-value candidates engaged.
How to halve time-to-hire without sacrificing quality
Here’s a senior-level playbook that marries speed with selectivity:
- Pre-build talent pipelines
Don’t wait until you need someone. Maintain active relationships (via communities, events, alumni) so passive engineers are warmed up when a role opens. - Use screening and simulations, not just CVs
Skip multi-hour technical interviews on screening. Instead, use short take-home tasks, coding challenges, or pair-programming sessions that reflect real work. - Parallelize evaluation stages
Don’t force a candidate to loop sequentially through 5 decision-makers. Run technical, leadership, and culture interviews in parallel rounds or days. - Offer clarity, speed & transparency
Give candidates clear timelines, feedback, and decision windows. A disjointed, slow process costs top candidates. In 2024, 60% of companies said their time-to-hire rose — often because candidate engagement dropped mid-funnel.(source) - Leverage contract-to-perm pathways
Hiring a contractor first (3–6 months) gives you a de-risked assessment of fit, upskilling, and alignment before committing to full-time. - Measure & optimize relentlessly
Define KPIs (time-to-offer, offer acceptance rate, source-to-hire by channel) and monitor them weekly. Use A/B tests: e.g. “Reduce stage 2 interviews by 1 and measure candidate drop-off.”
Why senior technology leaders choose to partner with Experts Group International
If you’re responsible for recruitment, engineering, or operations in a mid-to-large organization (1,000–10,000+ employees), you now know the challenges of the market. But execution is where many sponsors stumble: aligning stakeholders, sourcing elite talent, and managing process optimization.
At Experts Group International, our approach is built around:
- Sector-specialist recruiters who understand engineering, cleantech, supply chain, and value chain roles deeply.
- Embedded ops & analytics – live dashboards that let you see funnel performance, conversion, and bottlenecks.
- Flexible models – RPO, contract, fractional, or full-hire strategies adapted to your needs.
- Co-creation of your hiring model – we don’t just fill roles; we help you build hiring functions that scale.
If you’re ready to reduce your hiring cycle by up to 30%, cap mis-hire risk, and prioritise hires who drive growth – Talk to one of our specialist consultants today.
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