Manufacturing Benchmark Recruiting Metrics 2025

You might be surprised at how many people work in manufacturing: nearly 12 million in the United States, 7.4 million in Germany, and 2.7 million in the United Kingdom and France, respectively. Hiring in the industry can be challenging amidst lower professional visibility and in-person work required at what can be remote locations. SmartRecruiters’ latest report offers benchmark recruiting metrics that will help manufacturers see where they fit into the bigger picture and determine whether their own metrics are leading or lagging.

Recruiting Benchmarks 2025 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 the manufacturing metrics, offering a starting place for organizations to see where they’re performing well and where they can improve.

Note that the manufacturing industry is defined at the company level, not the job level. In other words, the data includes all roles offered by manufacturing companies, from home office roles to on-site workers such as warehouse associates and machine operators. 

Here are the top takeaways.

Applicant competition

• Manufacturers receive 48% fewer applications per opening than the global average across all industries, at just 38 applicants per hire. Therefore, interview and offer rates are 23% and 21% higher, respectively. Candidates respond by following through with a 92% offer acceptance rate, the highest among the industries included in the analysis.
• Because of the low applicant volume, candidates who apply to manufacturing roles have a 21% better chance of receiving an offer than those in other industries.

Time to hire

• While it may be easier to get a job in manufacturing, candidates will have to wait longer: it’s the slowest industry to hire with 55 days median time to hire, 45% longer than the global media across all industries. 
• Manufacturing candidates will have to wait more than a week to get their application reviewed and three weeks just to get an interview.
• To speed up hiring times, manufacturing employers could consider the use of AI-driving hiring tools; SmartRecruiters’ research found that time to hire for organizations using AI is typically 11 days faster than those that don’t use it. 

Recruiter productivity

• Manufacturing recruiters typically handle 28 hires per month, close to the global average of 30. Some manufacturing roles are filled with little to no recruiter involvement; the hiring manager fills the role directly, with recruiting teams supporting only job posting and offer management.
• For manufacturing teams that use hiring scorecards, adoption lags, at just 88% of team members completing them. Hiring managers in manufacturing could potentially speed up hiring and ensure objectivity by using interview scorecards to assess candidates.
• The use of AI-powered candidate chatbots, screening tools, and matching tools can help manufacturers streamline hiring operations and empower both recruiters to manage more requisitions at once.

Sources of hire

• While manufacturing employers lag in their use of referrals, they exceed in making internal hires, making 14% of hires from the employee base, 75% higher than the global average.

Manufacturing recruiting case study

PACCOR, a packaging manufacturer based in Germany with operations in 17 countries, used SmartRecruiters to build its first-ever global approach to hiring, training 100 hiring managers and 40 recruiters on the new system. In addition to process automation and a new career site, the team also benefited from scorecards to choose the best candidates from more than 12,000 applicants in the first year.

“The system creates transparency about how we evaluate candidates in a structured way,” said the Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding. “It helps us make fair decisions across international hiring teams because everyone has all the needed information at the same time.”

Get more recruiting benchmark metrics

Download the full report to get a global overview of hiring benchmarks plus insights on geographic differences in hiring. You’ll also find benchmark metrics on hiring in retail, hospitality, technology, and healthcare.