The labour market remains challenging in 2025: staff shortages inhibit growth, candidates are more selective than ever and traditional recruitment methods fall short. Yet the new year also offers perspective. With a smart approach and innovative tools, you can respond effectively to the changing labour market. What can you expect in 2025 and how can you turn obstacles into success? Read on and discover practical solutions for your recruitment strategy.
Slight job growth in 2025
Almost 4 in 10 entrepreneurs are hampered by organisational staff shortages.
It will come as no surprise that the tight labour market continues to pose problems for many employers. Nearly 40 per cent of business owners say that a shortage of staff is hampering their business operations. Despite a forecast decline in the number of vacancies in Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 – partly due to an increase in labour productivity – the number of jobs is still expected to rise in 2025, mainly due to higher economic growth in that year. The UWV estimates this job growth at just under 1 per cent.
The biggest recruitment challenges for 2025
This economic growth goes hand in hand with the ambition to expand the workforce. In the Recruitment Marketing Automation Trends Survey, 56 per cent of respondents stated that they plan to hire more staff in 2025 than they did last year. However, this will not be without its challenges. The tight labour market is the number one challenge for recruitment professionals (63 per cent). Other difficulties recruiters expect to face when attracting staff include:
- Reaching the right target group (33%)
- Too little insight into data (24%)
- Too small recruitment (marketing) team (23%)
As an employer, you won't get the tight labour market solved overnight, but there is a solution for the other challenges: recruitment marketing automation. (RMA)
Reach your ideal candidates with RMA: this is how it works
Why you can't easily reach your target audience
Just try to capture the attention of your target audience, people who are served thousands of ads a day. This is not an easy task, but it is much needed to build a strong employer brand and enthuse talent to join your organisation.
Recruitment agencies and recruiters are finding it harder than average to reach their target audience. This is likely because they rely heavily on sourcing, but the effectiveness of this approach is declining. Sourcing pressure remains above 40 per cent, meaning that 4 in 10 people in the workforce receive a recruitment message at least once a quarter. Due to this high sourcing pressure, candidates have become desensitised and the response rate leaves much to be desired. Recruitment agencies and temporary employment agencies, in particular, must therefore look for other ways to get noticed by their target audience.
47% of recruitment agencies and staffers see reaching the target audience as the biggest challenge, compared to 25% within SMEs and 29% of corporates.
Still getting in front of top talent
Instead of spending hours searching and approaching candidates via Linkedin Recruiter or other sourcing channels, you can reach thousands of people with a social media campaign, including those who are not active on sourcing channels such as Linkedin. With specific targeting, you make sure you reach exactly the people who fit your organisation and the vacancy. With A/B testing, you discover which content resonates best with your target group and with retargeting, you create the number of touchpoints needed to eventually make someone take action.
The latter - getting candidates to take action - is often a challenge. On many work-by sites, conversion rates are only 1% to 3%. If you have already reached talent and got them to click through to your website, it is an eternal waste if 97 out of 100 then disappear back into anonymity. With recruitment marketing automation, you can easily offer soft conversions - low-threshold actions - on your website, thereby increasing conversion enormously. This way, you not only manage to reach candidates, but also get to know them personally!
Centralise data in one real-time view in an RMA platform
To measure is to know. This saying didn’t come out of thin air. The figures behind your recruitment marketing activities tell you whether you’re on the right track and where you can optimise. But to do that, you need to have insight into that data – ideally in a single, handy dashboard. Transferring figures from all sorts of platforms and systems into a spreadsheet is too time-consuming and prone to errors. We need a better way!
If you run your campaigns via smart (recruitment marketing) software, you often don't need to switch between the ad platforms of Meta, Linkedin, Youtube/Google and whatnot to collect all the data. In fact, all the figures then come in real time in one central dashboard.
Not only will this save time, you will also be better able to turn the right knobs on your campaigns. For instance, you can quickly see which channels are performing above average and can reallocate your advertising budget accordingly. Or you deactivate a channel whose performance is declining. With real-time insight, you make the best decisions!
Achieve big results with a small team thanks to RMA
The workload of recruiters and recruitment marketers is sky-high. It requires more and more to attract candidates and bind them to your organisation. Almost a quarter of organisations are facing this challenge and see too small a team as the biggest stumbling block to recruitment success. Within SMEs - after the tight labour market - this is even the most important challenge. This is a stumbling block that can have considerable impact on the organisation, according to our RMA Trends Survey.
77% of organisations without revenue growth in 2024 struggle with too small a recruitment team.
You can look for the solution in expanding your team, but then you simply add more of the same. Your processes will not become more efficient, your strategy more effective. You kill several birds with one stone when you implement RMA. You save time, because recruiters set up campaigns in no time and, thanks to automatic qualification, recruiters are only in contact with the best candidates. The software handles non-qualified responses, without the need for a human hand!
By using RMA, you not only save time, but you also improve the recruiter experience (fewer manual, routine tasks) and you are not reliant on any one individual. And there are even more reasons to opt for software rather than expanding your team when facing a capacity challenge.
3 challenges, 1 solution
By implementing recruitment marketing automation, you will be better able to reach your target group, always have insight into real-time data and improve productivity, allowing you to achieve great results even with a smaller recruitment team. 1 solution for 3 challenges!
Want to find out more about the key recruitment developments and trends? Read the RMA Trends Report! Or discover how you can tackle the challenges of 2025 with the help of RMA. Book a demo or unlock our demo videos!
