Never a dull moment in recruitment land! The new year is upon us and traditionally we look ahead. Which recruitment trends should not be missed when making your plans for 2025? Based on the experiences of our clients, expert input and desk research we have drawn up the 5 most important recruitment trends for 2025. One thing is clear: technology will play a major role. Find out which 5 trends you should not miss and, above all, how to respond to them with your recruitment strategy!
Recruitment trend 1: Momentum on candidates is short
With the overload of advertising, push notifications and other incentives, it is harder than ever to attract and hold the attention and interest of candidates. For example, a sought-after developer receives an average of 5 to 10 messages per week from recruiters and we are confronted with some 10,000 advertisements every day.
Besides, candidates still have a choice. It may not be what you want to hear as an employer, but there are 10 others before you. This ensures that candidates do not delve very deeply into your organization and mainly want to find out quickly and easily whether you are interesting to them.
So grabbing and maintaining attention is quite an art in this day and age. Here are our tips for capitalizing on this recruitment trend:
- Make information readily available and make sure candidates find what they are looking for quickly. A user-friendly work-at-home site with lots of information is a must.
- With employer branding, make sure you get on your target audience's shortlist before they actively look for another job.
- Remove candidates from anonymity as early as possible by making responding approachable and non-committal. No long-winded forms, but let them send a simple app.
- Individualize the candidate journey to fit the needs of that particular candidate. A Gen Z'er may want to meet online first, while a candidate for a management role may want to visit physically to sample the atmosphere and meet the team.
- Don't strike out with automations and emphasize that someone can also have quick personal contact, such as with a recruiter or hiring manager, as soon as they are ready.
- Differentiate your story for the different segments in your target audience to capture their interest. A starter has very different needs than a professional who has already earned his stripes. Address each in the way that triggers them.
Recruitment trend 2: AI applications
Although the hype surrounding AI seems to have subsided, practical applications are now sprouting like mushrooms. You often see such a flow with innovations: it starts with a lot of fuss and everyone dives on it. Then it collapses, because it has little application, and then the logical applications of the innovation emerge. With AI, we have now reached that last point. That means you can really start using it in 2025!
And not only can you, by the way, you want to. The productivity of recruiters is going to skyrocket thanks to the advent of AI recruitment tools. With budgets under pressure and at the same time laborious recruitment processes thanks to the tight labor market, such an efficiency boost is more than welcome!
These AI applications are already there for recruitment:
- You no longer have to perform repetitive tasks yourself; AI does that for you. For example, let ChatGPT write your job ads.
- With an AI-tool like Chat Simple you can make all the information on your work-at-home site very findable for candidates. (And that's mega important, see recruitment trend 1.) This chatbot searches your entire site and can thus answer candidates' questions.
- Have auto-sourcing, auto-screening and auto-qualification performed by AI tools such as Carv, Gemini, Juicebox, Tengai or Mona.
- With AI-powered deep analytics tools, you uncover insights you would never have found otherwise.
- Personalize to the max using AI.
Recruitment trend 3: Recruitment marketing automation (RMA)
Recruitment marketing automation is the recruitment buzzword of the moment. As employers get their data better and better, they see where the bottleneck in attracting new employees is: in conversion. Most job sites have a conversion rate of only 1% to 3%. While those other visitors are definitely interested in the organization.
Only in the cookieless world in which we now find ourselves, you can't easily re-target these people. The only way to solve this is to get candidates out of anonymity as early as possible. Establish contact, even if it's just a tiny bit. Then you can build on this early contact and offer that candidate a personalized journey.
In addition, many recruiters are incredibly busy - mostly with tasks that can also be automated. If you eliminate those repetitive tasks by having software perform them, the recruiter has more time for personal contact with candidates.
With RMA, you have one solution to both challenges. Namely, you can automate many tasks and make establishing and maintaining contact easier. This gives candidates exactly what they want, namely getting the right info quickly and personal contact as soon as they are ready. The recruiter keeps more time for people work and can really give time and attention to that personal contact with candidates. Candidate happy, recruiter happy!
This is how you can apply RMA in your recruitment strategy:
- Extend the candidate journey with contact via email, text and WhatsApp.
- Build talent pools with engaged candidates (for example, from your alumni, candidates you meet at events and silver medalists) and leverage them to fill vacancies faster.
- Stay in constant conversation with your target audience and, as a result, become the first person they call or app when considering a switch.
This way you make the most of your media budget (because higher conversion) and shorten the time to hire. For new vacancies you can approach candidates from your talent pool and do not have to start up a whole recruitment process. Not surprising that many employers are fully committed to RMA, right?
Recruitment trend 4: optimizing the recruiter experience
The role of a recruiter is getting broader and broader. You have to be able to sourcing, know something about recruitment marketing, supervise onboarding, be strong in conversation, keep your stakeholders happy, and so on and so forth. It takes quite a bit to keep all those balls in the air.
As a result, we see specializations emerging within recruitment teams, for example with sourcers, recruiters and recruitment marketers. There is another way to improve the recruiter experience and reduce their workload: leave repetitive and administrative tasks (and there are many in recruitment!) to software. Automate these tasks so that personal contact becomes the core of the work. That's what most people became recruiters for!
As an employer, you can no longer do without good recruitment tech either. People are now so used to intuitive software that their demands on tooling are increasing. If a system is cumbersome, it causes a lot of frustration. As does having to work in all sorts of different systems that don't talk to each other. Centralization of tech is a must to keep it workable for recruiters.
You can improve the recruiter experience by:
- Unburden the recruiter with the right tech stack. In doing so, focus on tooling that integrates with each other and move away from point solutions. (Systems that provide only one small part of the big picture).
- Automate administrative and routine tasks to enable personal contact with candidates.
- Don't see the recruiter as the sheep with 5 legs. Bring specialization to your recruiting team to keep it manageable and maximize everyone's strengths.
Recruitment trend 5: Changes in the use of flex
The DBA Act has been around for years, but as of Jan. 1, 2025, the tax authorities have announced that they will actually enforce it. To hire self-employed workers, organizations must meet important criteria, otherwise you run the risk that the collaboration will be classified as disguised employment. With all its financial consequences.
Opinions vary on how this will affect employers and the labor market, but that it will have an impact is clear. It is likely that self-employed workers will be hired more often for limited assignments and will be changed frequently. Some employers are also opting to work less with self-employed workers and to employ permanent staff as much as possible.
Because the exact effect remains guesswork for now, it is difficult to say how you can respond to this properly. What you can at least do:
- Make sure you keep in close contact with your pool of freelancers, because chances are you're going to change more often or they'll change assignments sooner than you used to. So you need a larger flex pool.
- Capitalize on the other recruitment trends from this article so that you are better able to independently recruit permanent staff for roles that do not lend themselves to flex filling.
The common thread: efficiency, AI and automation
Whereas recruitment used to be the number one priority for almost all employers, in some sectors this has given way to other challenges. (This does not apply to all sectors, of course!) As a result, recruitment budgets are coming under pressure, but recruiting new employees remains a difficult process thanks to tight labor markets.
Recruitment teams are therefore very actively looking for new ways to find and retain talent. Ideally, these will ensure that you save time and/or recruit more effectively, because then you can do with less budget. Efficiency therefore remains central - just like last year - and from that there is a lot of focus on automation and AI.
How will you make sure you recruit smarter and get more results with a lower budget? We'd love to think with you!
