5 Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Trends in 2025
The future of talent acquisition and recruiting will likely center around speed, proactivity, and intentionality. Recruitment trends highlight the importance of actively searching for candidates for specific positions and developing a pool of candidates to be considered when specific jobs become available. Here are the latest trends in talent acquisition and recruiting:
1. Providing More Efficient and Proactive Recruiting with HR Automation
Technology can be a great resource, from finding new employees to pushing out communications. While many businesses still struggle with finding great talent, there’s a growing trend in recruiting to use HR automation and AI-assisted recruiting to help reduce costs and increase hiring efficiencies.
What makes this recruiting trend appealing is the level of integration across the hiring process and the faster overall process. Slow or poor communication from a talent acquisition team will not necessarily improve the candidate experience. This is where HR automation can help.
Some employers are speeding up the hiring process from end to end by:
• Using Paychex Recruiting Copilot to help find potential candidates faster.
• Leveraging recruiting technology such as automated screening forms to help vet candidates and streamline communication to keep them in the loop.
• Conducting interviews remotely to connect candidates and hiring managers who would otherwise experience delays and expenses associated with scheduling in-person interviews and coordinating travel.
Note that the use of HR automation in employment decisions is regulated by law in some jurisdictions.
2. Including Social Media as a Recruiting Channel
As businesses use social channels to grow their brands and generate leads, digital recruitment via social media may be an effective way to recruit talent.
Posting job opportunities and targeting social media platforms may be a successful way of recruiting talent that can be targeted to your industry and the skills you’re looking for in a new hire.
3. Focusing on the Candidate Experience
Adept businesses that focus on the employee experience know that a great experience starts from the first contact as a potential job candidate. It’s a phase of the employee cycle that recruiting teams prioritize since this experience often sets the tone for subsequent interactions. Whether an individual joins the business or not, the trend of prioritizing the candidate experience allows businesses to gather valuable feedback on their applications, interviews, hiring teams, and the efficiency of the entire process.
All hiring managers should have the same approach when interviewing candidates for the same position to better ensure consistency across the board.
4. Building and Using Referral Programs
Strong employee referral programs can prove worthwhile for businesses that build and leverage them because finding great talent takes time and resources.
An employee referral program is a structured set of processes that allows current employees to recommend people they know to help fill open positions within their organization. Well-organized programs implemented consistently in conjunction with a company’s overall hiring strategy can be integral to finding and maintaining a high-caliber workforce.
While referrals should not be the exclusive components of your hiring process, they can create a win-win-win scenario:
• The business gets leads on job candidates for minimal recruiting costs
• The employee is incentivized (usually through a bonus or monetary reward) for recommending someone who’s brought on board
• The job candidate gets a lead on an open position from someone connected to the organization
5. Creating Diverse and Inclusive Environments
Diverse and inclusive environments can deliver positive business benefits, and HR leaders often recognize this. For example, Paychex solutions empower businesses with actionable insights into their workforce analytics helping them identify areas where diversity and inclusion efforts may make the most meaningful impact.
Staying on top of recruiting and talent acquisition trends is possible with Paychex, which offers special pricing to ABA Members.
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