How the hiring landscape for research and insights talent has changed

Editor’s note: Randy Adis is Insights Career Network’s director of research on research, and SVP at RTi Research. Kahren Kersten is Insights Career Network’s VP of research on research, and founder of Experience Insights. Brian Fowler is Insights Career Network’s senior executive director. 

The process of hiring research and insights talent is hard to recognize even from just a few years ago. And trust us … we’re not talking about the latest "big idea" in methodology or some trendy tech jargon. We’re talking about how we actually find and hire research and insights professionals and those who support them. Something has shifted so drastically that it feels like we’ve lost our sense of equilibrium.

Remember when hiring meant you’d pick up an actual phone or sit down for an actual coffee with actual people to chat about an actual job? It was a time when networking meant getting out there and speaking with people instead of just hitting connect on LinkedIn. If that world doesn't seem all that long ago, it's because the “before times” were just five years ago, tops.

At the Insights Career Network (ICN), we’ve had a front-row seat to the transformation. We were borne out of the very disruption we’re now studying. While we started as a network to help research and insights professionals through career transitions three years ago this spring, the community’s twice-monthly meetups with more than 100 people can be viewed as a live stream of evolving hiring processes in a profession that continues to be challenged by overwhelming amounts of applicants and limited growth. 

In 2024, the ICN conducted research-on-research to understand the impact of this transformation in the insights labor market from both the recruiting, hiring and job seeker sides. Our work continues this year, with the help of a team of volunteer professional insights practitioners and partners.

With the introduction of AI, the more recent “return to office” trend and political and economic uncertainty continuing to restrict growth, more insights professionals are on the market and for much longer than before. 

Rather than a creeping, incremental shift, change came at us hard and fast, turbo-charged by COVID-19. In the before times, remote work was a nice-to-have perk for a few of us. After COVID-19, it became a must-have for all  the residual effect of which was a long-lasting shift in what people expect from work. Next came the “great resignation,” adding more flame to the fire. Organizations changed their approaches to attracting and retaining talents, while people were rethinking their work-life balance and career goals. And just as all this was happening, AI went nuclear, promising faster, more efficient hiring just like it did in research. Yet somehow, it’s only made everything messier.

The impact: A look at the new hiring ecosystem 

Our recent ICN Hiring Study, where we conducted interviews with 70 hiring managers, job seekers, recruiters and those involved in between, paints a pretty wild and surprising picture. One hiring manager summed it up perfectly: “A couple of years ago there were too few candidates, and they asked for too much money. Now, there are too many candidates and it's hard to sift through them to find the right fit.”

The study gave us a peek into the chaos of this new hiring ecosystem, but the real story lies in the common experiences of those in the thick of it. Hiring managers are buried under a pile of AI-created and -filtered resumes, yet when it comes to finding the right candidate, they’re still out of luck. Flooded with an embarrassment of talent riches, they look to limit risk by relying on their existing networks and forcing job seekers through exercises and hoops to prove their qualifications or “cultural fit.” Talented folks are getting tossed aside because they don’t know the right people or their experience doesn’t hit the right keywords on some algorithm’s checklist. 

How are executive recruiters faring in all of this? Where once they were viewed as go-to talent scouts, in today’s world they are being bypassed in favor of AI-driven job boards like LinkedIn. We were led to believe that technology could find the right fit faster and more efficiently. But while AI is able to cast a wider net, it can miss the human judgment and honed instincts that recruiters bring. In our counseling with insights professionals and those looking to hire them, we regularly hear stories of false negative identification of candidates – people who would have normally been passed through, if hiring managers could actually review every applicant. Culture fit, leadership potential and intangibles that make someone perfect for the job are often overlooked by AI to the detriment of research and insights professionals.

Then there’s the job listings themselves. Some vanish in a flash, while others just keep popping up … and worse still, some are just plain fake. AI’s the matchmaker, but it’s unclear if HR’s “human touch” is still needed or just an anachronism of a bygone era. We’ve all been sucked into this vortex of efficiency, and yet somehow, landing on great talent feels harder than ever.

How can we fix hiring challenges in research and insights? 

We’ll dig deeper into this transformation over the next several months. We'll unpack how we got here and why we tore up the old playbook and replaced it with something that’s at the same time both faster and messier. We’ll explore what we should keep, what we should rethink and how we can best leverage AI as a human tool in the journey and not an end state.

Let’s cut to the chase for a moment: This series isn’t just our hot take on the latest hiring trends. It’s the start of a conversation we need to have as an industry. If we’re in the business of understanding human behavior (and last, we checked that’s still at the core of what we do) then we need to make sure that our hiring processes aren’t losing sight of the people part.

In a future article, we’ll compare the traditional and modern ways of hiring. But a heads-up – it’s a lot messier than a simple “old way bad, new way good” debate. Like everything else in our industry, the truth is found somewhere in the grey areas.

Methodology

The ICN Hiring Study was fielded using human-moderated 30-minute in-depth interviews conducted on Zoom and Voxpopme. Thirty-eight (38) hiring managers and recruiters, with equal representation from brands, agencies and recruiters, were interviewed in July and August of 2024. The ICN then interviewed 32 insights job seekers in August and September 2024, with an equitable ethnic and geographic mix. Ten experienced volunteer research professionals from the ICN community served as interviewers.