2025 Talent
Trend Report.

The New Recruitment Reality

How are organizations recruiting and retaining the best talent in 2025? Built In conducted a comprehensive survey of talent leaders, delving into their priorities and challenges as they prepare for a new year.

And even as economic uncertainty looms in the U.S. and abroad, the forecast is still cautiously optimistic. Yes, talent leaders face many challenges as they aim to effectively manage their organization's time, budget and resources, but they are also successfully activating diverse, multi-channel recruitment strategies that are building employer brand and ensuring they attract the right talent to fill their most critical roles.

This shift from traditional recruitment methods encourages talent leaders to develop a strategy with a broader marketing perspective. Employer branding initiatives are proactive, driving the discovery of the best candidates right where they are, often even before they start a new job search: an approach that is essential to today's talent industry and securing the leading expertise your organization needs to drive overall business goals.

About the Data

The Built In 2025 Trend Survey was conducted in January and February of 2025, targeting talent recruitment and human resource professionals. The quantitative survey was designed with 27 questions covering 2025 recruitment strategies, priorities and challenges, budget, technology, and demographic information. There were 364 total respondents.

The survey yielded insights across five major trends, providing talent leaders with the guidance to successfully navigate their recruitment strategies in 2025.

Priorities Shift as Hiring Recovers

After a period of volatility following the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, where high-volume hiring sprees precipitated massive cuts, 2024 was a year of increasing stability and modest growth, largely driven by the tech industry.

Hiring will continue to recover in 2025, with 49.4% of survey participants projecting an increase in hiring for the year compared to 2024, while 33.9% expect hiring needs to remain the same year over year.

In the tech sector, unemployment rates decreased to 2%, while the "Magnificent Seven" (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) experienced 63% average gains over the year, accounting for more than half of the gains on the S&P 500.

This growth is expected to carry into 2025, driven by emerging technologies like AI, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. Overall an optimistic forecast, with AI perceived as a stabilizing force, generating high-quality hires both in and outside the tech industry.

With the growth of the tech industry driving the U.S. market, it's not surprising that talent professionals continue to find themselves recruiting for skilled tech expertise. Companies are hiring fewer generalists but aggressively seeking high-skilled, specialized engineers in AI, cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

Economic Uncertainty Requires a Balanced Approach to Global Hiring

While US-based hiring is a top priority, the majority of North American survey respondents also have an international hiring strategy.

The Built In team predicts that India, Europe, and Latin America will see faster tech job growth, especially in AI, fintech, and cloud-based roles. However, we also expect U.S. hiring to continue to grow for specialized, highly-skilled tech roles.

The reported top challenges hiring outside of the U.S. are similar to domestic challenges and include Resources and Budget Constraints, Building a Strong Employer Brand, and Skills Shortages.

Finding High-Quality Tech Talent Remains Challenging

Hiring qualified tech talent remains consistently challenging for HR and recruitment professionals. Business or financial factors, like competing on compensation and benefits, rank as a major challenge for all companies, even larger enterprises.

Finding candidates with specific skills was ranked second as most challenging, driven by the proliferation of new AI roles and the need to hire based on skills versus traditional experience. With return to work on the rise (the percentage of Built In clients' roles that are remote are at an all-time, post-pandemic low of 18%, down from 33% a year ago), competing on flexible work types remains a top challenge for more than a third of respondents.

Not surprisingly, smaller and mid-size companies report more difficulty building a tech-forward employer brand than their colleagues at large companies, also citing navigating budget and resource constraints as a major hurdle in developing these programs.

When organizations experience delays and challenges in recruitment, hiring and retention become business risks. An understaffed or wrongly-staffed team can lead to all sorts of problems, including missing roadmap deliverables, sales targets, or stakeholder obligations.

Further complicating the tech talent landscape is the race to fill emerging roles in areas like AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. Nearly half of respondents indicated that emerging tech roles will make up at least 25% of their planned hires in 2025.

• LinkedIn's "Jobs on the Rise" report for 2025 lists Artificial Intelligence Engineer as the fastest-growing role in the U.S., reflecting the escalating demand for AI expertise.
• Low-code/no-code and AI-assisted coding will reduce demand for basic dev work, but complex problem-solving, architecture, and system design skills will remain essential.
• Demand will increase for specialized engineers including Cloud and AI infrastructure engineers, Cybersecurity experts, and Embedded software and hardware engineers.

Acquiring Top Talent Demands Multi-Channel Investment

To build a high-intent pipeline of quality talent, recruiters need to enlist more channels and technology to support the entire candidate journey. Talent leaders are activating multiple recruiting channels as part of their hiring strategies.

Survey respondents ranked Referrals as the most effective channel for hiring qualified candidates, while Social media recruiting and Events were ranked the least effective.

The close rankings across third-party job platforms, employer branding, recruiting agencies, tech-specific platforms, and outbound sourcing reflects the new candidate job-seeking experience. Recruiters need to support each of these channels to ensure they are meeting candidates across the platforms where they are looking for opportunities.

The Multi-Channel Candidate Journey

Why are talent leaders deploying a multi-channel approach? The candidate journey has changed and that means the approach to recruitment must change as well. Candidates research and shop for jobs the same way they shop for brands.

Talent leaders must invest in channels that build awareness of their company and career opportunities, generate interest in the employer brand, and provide tools for a candidate's consideration and evaluation to establish a high-quality pipeline of talent that meets their organization's specific hiring goals.

Investments in Employer Brand Are on the Rise

As candidates evaluate career opportunities in new ways, employer branding will play a critical role in finding and keeping top talent.

As HR professionals continue to face many hiring and recruitment challenges, the shift in mindset from sourcing to marketing becomes increasingly important. Employer Branding remains a highly prioritized opportunity, and it is also a key strategy in managing employee retention, ranked the number one employer branding priority for HR professionals.

The Top 5 Employer Branding Priorities

1. Driving retention with employer branding
2. Measuring the ROI of our employer brand
3. Building an employer brand that appeals to tech candidates
4. Investing in employer branding partnerships
5. Enhancing authentic employee storytelling and engagement

A Second Year of Stability and Growth

While the global economy and many industries are projected to face volatility in 2025, the tech industry and related hiring initiatives are poised for a second year of stability and growth following 2024, with a focus on skilled jobs in emerging tech sectors like AI.

Talent recruitment continues to evolve as hiring initiatives increasingly overlap with traditional marketing and brand activity. As a result, organizations are leveraging more and more diverse tools and strategies to overcome both traditional challenges like hiring qualified candidates, as well as business challenges and resource constraints.

Recommendations + Resources

Explore insights to support your employer brand strategy and attract AI talent in the new hiring landscape.

How to Build an Employer Branding Strategy

The goal of an effective branding strategy for a company is to control their brand perception in the market and help it acquire and retain top talent. A proactive approach to recruiting, it also allows organizations to maintain top-of-mind awareness among passive job seekers. Here are some tips and resources to get started.

• 01

  Develop a Compelling Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

  An EVP explains what the individual candidate or employee can expect of the company and what the company expects of them. Start your EVP discovery >

• 02

  Don't Forget About Retention

  Each lost employee can cost as much as two times their annual salary to replace. Take the time to incorporate employee retention initiatives while creating your branding strategy. Learn how >

• 03

  Explore Potential Promotion Channels

  Owned channels, like your careers page or social media profiles, will likely be your primary resource, but don't be afraid to explore the realms of paid and earned media. Identify where your ideal candidates spend their time and take your message to them. This is one area to involve your marketing team.

• 04

  Create a Content Calendar

  Whether you're publishing a recruiting blog, running targeted ads on social media, or rolling out new features on your careers page, creating a content calendar can simplify the process and hold people accountable for deadlines.

• 05

  Don't Be Afraid to Course Correct

  There will come a time when you need to make some changes to your employer branding strategy to address a weakness or capitalize on a new opportunity. How do you know when it's time? Learn more >

Tips to Attract Top AI Talent

Competition for employers to attract the best AI talent will continue to increase as the sector grows. Try these tips to enhance your recruitment strategy.

More Resources for Better AI Hires