Never a dull moment in recruitment land! The new year is upon us and we traditionally look ahead. Which recruitment trends should you not miss when making your plans for 2025? Based on our clients' experiences, expert input and desk research, we have drawn up the 5 most important recruitment trends for 2025. From these, one thing is abundantly clear: technology plays a huge 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
The overload of advertising, push notifications and other stimuli makes it harder than ever to attract and keep the attention and interest of candidates. On average, a sought-after developer receives 5 to 10 messages a 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 don't delve very deeply into your organisation and mainly want to find out quickly and easily whether you are interesting to them.
In this day and age, grabbing and maintaining attention is quite an art. Here are our tips for capitalising on this recruitment marketing trend:
- Make information easily available and make sure candidates find what they are looking for quickly. A user-friendly job 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 accessible and non-committal. No long-winded forms, but let them send a simple app.
- Individualise the candidate journey to match 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 physically visit the company to get a feel for the atmosphere and meet the team.
- Don't get carried away with automations and emphasise that someone can also have quick personal contact, for example 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 from a professional who has already earned his stripes. Address each in the way that triggers them.
Recruitment trend 2: AI applications
Although the hype around AI seems to have died down, practical applications are 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 is not yet very applicable, 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'll want to. Recruiters' productivity 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 labour market, such an efficiency boost is more than welcome!
These AI applications are already here for recruitment:
- You no longer have to perform repetitive tasks yourself, AI does that for you. Let ChatGPT write your job ads, for example.
- With an AI tool like Chat Simple, you can make all the information on your job site highly findable for candidates. (And that is mega important, see recruitment trend 1.) This chatbot searches your entire site and can thus answer candidates' questions.
- Auto-sourcing, auto-screening and auto-qualification are performed by AI tools such as Carv, Gemini, Juicebox, Tengai or Mona.
- With AI-powered deep analytics tools, you will uncover insights you would never have found otherwise.
- Personalise to the max using AI.
Recruitment trend 3: Recruitment marketing automation (RMA)
Recruitment marketing automation is the recruitment buzzword of the moment. As employers are getting their data in order, they see where the bottleneck in attracting new employees lies: in conversion. Most job sites have a conversion rate of only 1% to 3%. While those other visitors are definitely interested in the organisation.
In the cookieless world we now find ourselves in, it’s no longer so easy to retarget these people. The only way to solve this is to bring candidates out of anonymity as early as possible. Make contact, even if it’s just a tiny bit. You can then build on this initial contact and offer that candidate a personalised journey.
In addition, many recruiters are incredibly busy - mostly with tasks that can also be automated. If you remove these repetitive tasks by having them done by software, the recruiter will have more time for personal contact with candidates.
With RMA, you have one solution for both challenges. Because you can automate many tasks and make it easier to establish and maintain contact. This gives candidates exactly what they want, namely getting the right info quickly and personal contact as soon as they are ready. The recruiter is left with more time for people work and can really give time and attention to that personal contact with candidates. Candidate happy, recruiter happy!
How to apply RMA in your recruitment strategy:
- Extend the candidate journey with contact via e-mail, SMS and WhatsApp.
- Build talent pools with engaged candidates (e.g. from your alumni, candidates you meet at events and silver medalists) and use these to fill vacancies faster.
- Stay in constant conversation with your target audience and therefore become the first person they call or app when considering a move.
This way, you can make the most of your media budget (because higher conversion) and shorten your time to hire. For new vacancies, you can approach candidates from your talent pool and do not have to start a whole recruitment process. Not surprising that many employers are fully committed to RMA, right?
Recruitment trend 4: optimising the recruiter experience
The role of a recruiter is getting broader. You need 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. Keeping all these balls in the air is quite a challenge.
As a result, we see specialisations developing within recruitment teams, for example with sourcers, recruiters and recruitment marketers. There is another way to improve the recruiter experience and thus 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 is what most people became recruiters for!
As an employer, you also need good recruitment tech. 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. Centralisation 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. Focus on tooling that integrates with each other and move away from point solutions. (Systems that only take care of 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 five legs. Specialise your recruitment team to keep it manageable and make the most of everyone's strengths.
Recruitment trend 5: Changes in the use of flex
The DBA Act has been around for years, but from 1 January 2025 the tax authorities have announced that they will actually enforce it. To hire self-employed workers, organisations must meet important criteria, otherwise you run the risk of the partnership being classified as a disguised employment relationship. With all the financial consequences that entails.
Opinions vary on how this will affect employers and the job market, but it is clear that it will have an impact. It is likely that self-employed people will be hired more often for limited assignments and will be changed regularly. Some employers are also choosing to work less with self-employed workers and work with permanent staff as much as possible.
As the exact impact remains a guess for now, it's hard to say how you can capitalise on them. What you can at least do:
- Make sure you keep in close contact with your pool of freelancers, because chances are you will change more often or they will change assignments earlier than you were used to. So you need a bigger flex pool.
- Capitalise on the other recruitment trends from this article to improve your ability to independently recruit permanent staff for roles that don't 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 labour market shortages.
Recruitment teams are actively looking for new ways to find and engage talent. Ideally, these will allow you to 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 ensure you recruit more effectively and achieve better results on a tighter budget? We’d be happy to help you work it out!
