In 2025, recruitment is shaping up to be both exciting and challenging. Why? The job market is evolving faster than ever. While candidates are expecting more personalized and seamless experiences, organizations are navigating changing hiring needs, a growing focus on diversity, and the rise of AI in recruitment processes. It is clear that staying ahead in talent acquisition will require creativity, adaptability, and a focus on what truly matters to candidates.
To help you navigate this complicated landscape, we’ve identified five key predictions for recruitment this year. We spoke with Maja Lindström, CPO at Talentech, along with our internal experts in everything recruitment and HR, to uncover the top trends and challenges recruiters will face in the coming year. These insights will help you prepare for what’s coming, adapt to changes, and refine your hiring strategies to not only attract, but more importantly retain the right talent.
So, what do we predict will be the center of attention this year?
1) Employee engagement never stops
As we learnt from this report, 75% of candidates are eager to learn more about their new employer just after they’ve signed a contract. The time that passes from signing to the first day at work is often a missed opportunity to build an engagement and set a new hire up for success.
In 2025, more HR teams should therefore look at bridging this gap. And how do they do that? They should ensure that all new hires get a structured and engaging pre-boarding experience. This can be achieved by combining pre-boarding platforms that facilitate seamless communication with automation tools to handle administrative tasks. This approach ensures new hires are fully prepared and feel connected before their first day. Remember, employee engagement starts during recruitment, and it truly never stops.
2) Get ready for changing needs
The future is uncertain. And it is no different for the world of recruitment. For the coming year, it is harder than ever to predict what talent acquisition will look like. Even though a lot of people are anticipating the economy to turn for the better and hiring to increase, there may also be some backlash. That is why, more than ever, recruiters will need to be ready to adapt to candidates’ as well as their organization’s changing needs in recruitment and find creative ways to do that.
When the market shifts there are often opportunities for those who move first, and with a creative mindset, combined with a strategic plan for Talent Acquisition, recruiters can be one step ahead of the business and act fast when new opportunities or needs arise. By being creative and personal in all aspects of the candidate journey such as employer branding content, non-traditional ways to reach candidates, communication adapted to the channel, more personal email communication and an engaging selection process, employers can find ways to always be up to date and relevant for job seekers.
3) Diverse candidate pools
The job market will continue to suffer from a matching problem that will only increase with a higher pace of change, where some roles and skills will be in extremely high demand. In fact, lack of talent is reported to be one of the most important blockers for growth in the coming years. For this reason, recruiters need to look beyond the obvious sources of talent to meet the needs of their organizations.
Targeting candidates where they are and engaging passive candidates will not only become one of the most important skills for recruiters but also broaden the definition of what a good candidate looks like. A candidate's potential for growth will be more important than experience, as reskilling and internal mobility will become key strategies for talent acquisition.
4) Measure what matters
HR and recruiters have systems full of talent data, but the data is not always used to support decision making and optimize processes as it should. Instead of relying solely on basic KPIs, talent acquisition teams will need to dig deeper, asking why the numbers look the way they do and identifying actionable steps for improvement.
However, analyzing data is a skill in itself. Yet, most recruiters simply don’t have this skill as their main strength or interest. Interpreting charts and tables can simply feel too complicated or overwhelming, making it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions. To bridge this gap, organizations might consider adding roles like HR operations specialists or HR analysts to their teams or ensuring the right tools that allow a clear and easy data analysis to be done are in place. Looking ahead into the not-too-distant future, we’ll most likely use AI assistants to deliver actionable insights rather than just presenting the data.
5) AI reinvents the whole process
As this report showed us, AI is now clearly playing a role on both sides of the recruitment process. With this broad AI use, strategies for ensuring diversity and inclusion face new challenges, but also have new solutions. In 2025, recruiters may finally move beyond the traditional cover letter, adopting methods that are both less biased and more effective for evaluating candidates.
With all these changes, hiring teams should rethink their recruitment processes and carefully examine each step to identify risks and opportunities. And with what goal? To create a fair and balanced evaluation that combines AI-driven efficiencies with human oversight. And who knows, the future may even bring the end of the CV as we know it, as organizations fully embrace skill-based and personality-based recruitment processes that prioritize capabilities over credentials.
The takeaway?
It is clear that in 2025, recruitment will not be just about finding the right talent, but rather about rethinking how you engage with candidates and implementing technology to make this engagement more effective. The organizations that thrive this year will be the ones that embrace change, focus on candidate-centric strategies, and leverage data effectively.
Our advice? Start by identifying the gaps in your current recruitment process, focus on creating meaningful connections with candidates, and don’t be afraid to innovate. And if you are needing or looking for even more insights, we have good news for you. You can check out and download our Nordic Recruitment Report that compiles data from over 5000 candidates, completely for free.
And in case you missed it, we have also published our Nordic HR Report. After reading both reports, you will most definitely have all the data and insights you need to perfect your HR and recruitment game.
