
Talent Attraction Trends In 2025
It’s 2025 and the new year awaits. This could be your year to shine as a thought-leader and industry expert, and that’s because talent is once again a hot topic across your organisation. Your calendar is already getting booked with hiring managers and senior stakeholders wanting to know what to prepare for the year ahead.
Not to mention all the messages on Teams.
From the AI revolution to return-to-office initiatives, plenty is changing the world of work and getting people thinking. Looking for some valuable nuggets to help focus your team’s attention? Here’s a roundup of key developments we expect for digital recruitment in 2025.
AI-organised search results pages for jobs
The AI-generated summary appearing at the top of a Google search is becoming a familiar sight, even if it’s currently only served for 0.05% of searches.
This AI Overview expands on the previous Featured Snippets element to synthesize content from different sites into a single source, which pre-empts the user’s next questions and path of interest.
In 2025, Google and Bing are going one big leap further to continue transforming the appearance of their entire search engine results pages, with the help of AI.
We’ll see results pages that cater to a variety of user intents, both transactional and informational in nature.
For example, Bing’s deep search tool tells us that a user searching “legal admin jobs London” is most likely to be seeking relevant job listings. However, their intention may also be to find platforms where they can apply or to research salary brackets and other trends for this role.

What does this mean for you?
So what does this mean for you and your career site? It means there is an opportunity to increase visibility for key pages by upgrading your content.
By adding further sections and key answers on your pages, you can satisfy a variety of search intents. This will put your organisation in the best position to capitalise on this AI evolution in search engines, which is due to accelerate in the months ahead.
Gen Z Candidate Behaviour
Also known as ‘Zoomers’, Gen Z were born between 1997 and 2012 and now represent about 27% of the workforce. That means those who are just joining in entry-level roles or people now maturing into their career journeys.
What are some top-level things we know about this group from a talent acquisition perspective?
- This generation are increasingly turning to AI chatbots. ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity are being used to carry out their job research. By analysing how closely AI associates your brand with your key hiring areas, you can increase the chances you’ll be listed as a notable employer by these AI tools.
- Great-looking and seamless digital experiences expected as standard. Invest in your careers site, streamline your application journey and make sure accessibility features such as mobile applications are supported.
- Values-driven. Make sure you’re communicating how your organisation impacts the world positively across areas like community, diversity, sustainability and wider purpose.
- Casual vibes preferred. Gen Z employers may not want to stand on ceremony and respond to less formal workwear requirements, senior figures being approachable and company culture that isn’t defined by hierarchy.
- More working options. Many Gen Z candidates began their careers in hybrid or remote roles and want the choice. That doesn’t mean you’ll never see them in the office – in fact, 75% want in-person feedback and 39% want to communicate with their teams in person.
Skills-based Hiring
This is a movement from 2024 that’s set to only grow. Skill-based hiring means looking past formal experience, qualifications and education to focus on candidates’ real-life skills – what they can do, not just what they can list on paper. According to TestGorilla’s recent study, 90% of employers found skill-based hiring cut their rate of mishires.
It’s particularly being discussed in areas that have seen long-term struggles with diversity such as STEM fields like technology and finance – finding underrepresented people with the right outlook and comparable skills and then providing training as part of the role.

There are also more employers bringing this approach to areas such as Graduate roles, being open to equivalent experience candidates have gained to launch a career. This recognises that they may not have followed the traditional formal education pathway but have found another route to succeed.
What does this mean for you?
Is skills-based hiring already at work within your organisation? This year’s seen a whole host of new tools become available to help in assessing, evaluating and onboarding candidates, so look at your technology stack and what’s involved for the upcoming year.
No current skills-based hiring? Consider looking first to where the same principles of matching on personality before current skills is taking place in internal mobility initiatives in your company – such as secondments, rotational programmes or internships.
There may be resources or experience here that can be used to create new routes into hard-to-fill or under-resourced areas of your business.
A strengthening of privacy rules in browsers
There are two ways that browsers are getting talked about this year – embedding AI features and giving users more control over their privacy.
For example, leading web browser, Google Chrome, is expected to strengthen their privacy settings this year, after scrapping their previous approach to third-party cookie depreciation in 2024.
What does this mean for you?
This will impact the targeting and measurement of paid job ads, as less data will be collected.
Consequently, we’ll need to explore new ways to capture candidate visits and information. Other methods could include standalone landing pages or even first-party data solutions where candidates are rewarded for interactively supplying data or signing up to talent pools.
Focusing on application quality
As the financial times recently discussed, there’s tough times ahead for both employers and candidates – as seen in the UK graduate job market.
The Institute of Student Employers reported that there were 59 per cent more applications on average for each job, and this is fuelled by candidates turning to AI tool adoption.
As CV’s can be more quickly generated at a lower quality than written, this has led to a greater amount of work for hiring managers and recruitment teams as there’s more to sort through.

As a result, we’ve seen some of the biggest and most competitive employers we support prioritising attracting quality applications over pure numbers of applications. This is helping to relieve pressure on their teams and free up resources.
What does this mean for you?
Consider where your internal candidate review processes can be streamlined or automated to free up your team.
There are even AI tools available to help counter this for employers, such as software that compares applications submitted against the original job description to make up shortlists of those most relevant to the role.
In 2025, we anticipate that ATS providers will also look to tackle this issue by disallowing auto-apply via AI bots. Good news for your hiring teams!
Looking to the future
Whatever is in store for talent attraction and digital recruitment during 2025, it will be more important than ever to be able to cut through the noise and make connections with candidates.
Technology offers both challenges and solutions for employers in uncovering talent, being easily discoverable and engaging candidates to get excited about your brand.
At Enhance Media, we’re trusted by some of the world’s busiest hiring managers to support them to stay ahead of the curve. If you’re looking for more insights on how to stay ahead of a changing digital recruitment landscape then sign up to our newsletter below or book a meeting with our Account Director.
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