Talent Acquisition trends to look out for in 2025

The world of work has changed significantly over the past five years, and talent acquisition has had to flex back and forth to support that. Hiring freezes and switching to fully remote as countries struggled to deal with the COVID pandemic was quickly followed by the ‘new normal’ of hybrid work environments where corporate culture became harder to quantify as people got used to changing jobs without changing their place of work. 2024 saw “AI” go mainstream and a scramble by almost every SaaS provider to switch out all mentions of “algorithms and machine learning” for “AI” or “AI-enhanced” in their sales material. Right now 2025 still has too many unknowns for me to feel confident making solid predictions so instead, here are some trends to look out for this year. Some of these are specific to the US, but most can apply globally.

More job posts will contain salary info.

On Jan 1 2025, Illinois and Minnesota became the latest states to introduce a legal requirement to disclose a pay range on job posts. Some companies have already opted to simplify their processes by applying this consistently across US/North America even when not required by law, but I still expect there to be a small number of companies holding out and trying to protect their salary data when they don’t have to disclose.

AI will be used more and more

It’s the obvious one but it’s obvious for a reason. I can’t remember the last sales call I took where there wasn’t also an AI notetaker preparing to send a detailed analysis to the salesperson afterwards. Forward-thinking companies have already found ways to create value using AI, whether that be using it to save time in the prototyping/testing phase, or in multiple stages of a content generation workflow. Microsoft’s copilot agents have game-changing potential for large companies who are already embedded in the MS 365 ecosystem. LinkedIn are planning to launch a ‘Recruiting Copilot’ in the second half of the year and while it seems like it’ll work best in smaller companies with one-man recruiting teams, it has potential to reduce the administrative workload for all recruiters. I haven’t found the current AI-Enhanced features of LinkedIn Recruiter to be especially useful yet and I don’t see myself using them much until the user experience advances beyond the current “MS Clippy 2.0” feel.

Some AI killer apps for Recruiting will emerge

The issues with LinkedIn Recruiter’s “AI-enhanced” features is that they don’t enhance the capability of the tool or save much time overall. LLM-driven AI models excel with written inputs and outputs so it makes sense that the first real viable AI-apps for recruiting are strongest: Metaview and Brighthire have both found a way to generate value using AI to summarize interviews/intake calls, and Brighthire also has functionality to help with the process of creating and editing a job description/job post. I think we’ll see more companies like these emerge in the next 12 months and I’m excited to see how TA evolves.

Volume of recruiting scams will increase

This is more of a prediction, but one downside of improved AI tech in recruiting is that it creates more opportunities for scammers to trick people into believing they’re in a legitimate recruiting process. Conversational AI agents that can handle outreach and screen candidates over text (or even calls) allows scammers to massively increase volume without the need for extra people manually working on trying to trick unsuspecting jobseekers.

Let me know what you’re expecting to see more or less of in 2025.