Talent acquisition in 2025: Trends, hot takes, and lessons from 2024
Applications per hire surged by 182% from 2021 to 2024, making the hiring process more competitive
Ashby
We’re officially a month into 2025. The early year chaos is settling, feet are firmly under the table, and it’s time to smash out a fantastic year ahead. As we get stuck into 2025, we want to look at what is trending for this year and reflect on some of the key data driven insights of 2024.
As many of you know, we launched HighlightTA at the end of 2024. With nearly 30 years of combined talent acquisition experience, we’ve been lucky enough to work with amazing people and gain valuable insights along the way. So while the business is new, what we do is not. We built HighlightTA around what companies actually need in this market, flexible hiring support without the massive agency fees.
At the core of our work is data driven recruiting. It helps us make informed decisions, hire better candidates, and gives recruiters something solid to rely on instead of gut feel. Our take on 2025? It’s going to be dominated by data, from AI’s impact on hiring to the death of small internal talent teams, the changing dynamics of interviews, and the rising importance of employer branding. We’ve gathered insights from Ashby, Gartner, Glassdoor, and our own team’s hot takes on what’s coming next.
AI vs AI: The hiring war no one wins?
AI. Everyone and their dog is talking about it, and for good reason. It is already making major waves in talent acquisition, starting with candidates.
We predict 2025 will remain a company driven market with more candidates than jobs. That means job seekers will continue looking for ways to gain an edge, and AI is giving them tools to do it. Resumes are being customized, applications are being auto submitted, and AI is flooding job postings with candidates who shouldn’t even be applying.
According to Ashby, job applications are up 4x compared to 2021. The result? More noise, more irrelevant applications, and more work for recruiters.
On the recruiter side, AI is helping save time on repetitive tasks, scanning resumes, sourcing candidates, and adjusting searches based on hiring manager feedback. We’ve been testing AI sourcing tools, and while they show promise for technical roles, email outreach response rates were painfully low, forcing us back to LinkedIn InMails.
Our ATS, Ashby, has an AI powered filtering tool that we are still getting to grips with. Early signs suggest that it does a good job filtering candidates, especially when there are core requirements like specific degrees or years of experience. It helps narrow down a large applicant pool efficiently, though we are still testing its full capabilities. We will share an update on how useful it is in a future blog. But here’s the real hot take:
💡 Candidate AI vs recruiter AI might just cancel each other out. Instead of making hiring easier, it’s just creating more competition and noise.
The slow death of internal SMB talent teams
The mass layoffs across TA over the last two years created a huge shift. Hiring demands are still high, timelines remain tight, yet internal talent teams are shrinking.
For companies with fewer than 300 employees, permanent internal TA teams are becoming a thing of the past. Why? Because demand doesn’t justify a full time team. Even when hiring picks up, it’s unpredictable, and the last thing great companies want to do is hire and fire recruiters in cycles. It damages brand reputation, costs money, and creates instability.
📊 Key data points:
Recruiters are screening 40% more candidates per hire compared to 2021 (Ashby).
The number of recruiter interviews has increased, even as TA teams shrink (Ashby).
Companies can save up to 50% using on demand talent teams like HighlightTA.
This is exactly why we built HighlightTA. Companies still need high quality hiring support, but they don’t want to pay agency fees or carry permanent overhead. Flexible talent solutions that scale up or down based on hiring demand are the future.
Someone will hire a bot this year
Interviewing has always been tricky, and let’s be honest, some candidates have been gaming the system for years. If you’ve worked in technical recruitment, you have probably come across candidates having someone else take their interview for them.
Now, AI is making it even easier to cheat in interviews. We’re seeing candidates on video and phone interviews pause to type before answering, as if they are feeding the question into ChatGPT to generate a response. In some cases, AI tools are even listening to the interviewer in real time and suggesting answers for candidates to say back. It is only a matter of time before someone unknowingly hires a bot instead of a real person.
Companies are catching on. We predict interview questions will start shifting to make it harder for AI generated answers to pass unnoticed. Expect more personal, situational questions and deeper follow ups to test if candidates actually know what they claim to.
One of our favorite questions: “What are the top three things you are looking for in your next position?” AI struggles with questions that require real self reflection.
Hot take: This screams TikTok content. Someone is 100% going to film themselves landing a job using AI, all for the likes. Would we watch it? Absolutely.
Employer brand will make or break hiring in 2025
As the market picks up in 2025, employer branding is going to be huge.
Candidates are becoming pickier, looking beyond the job itself and digging into a company’s reputation, culture, and financial stability. Companies that take a hands off approach to their employer brand will struggle to close offers and retain high performers. Transparency, authentic employee engagement, and responding to feedback, whether on Glassdoor or elsewhere, will be key factors in attracting top talent.
Expect culture to be top of mind. If companies want people back in the office, they need to give them a reason. The old days of expensive employer branding campaigns are gone. Authenticity wins. Companies that lean into their real identity, rather than trying to manufacture a brand, will win the race for talent.
📊 Key data points:
The average offer acceptance rate for technical roles is 73%, while for business roles, it's 84%1. This indicates that candidates in technical roles are more likely to decline job offers than those in business roles. (Ashby).
67% of employees say they would stay longer if their company offered upskilling and advancement opportunities (Gartner).
Remote vs in office retention trends will become even clearer in the second half of the year (Glassdoor).
Looking back at 2024: data driven insights
Reflecting on 2024, several key data points highlight how the talent acquisition landscape has shifted:
Recruiter productivity
Hires per recruiter stabilized at 5.4 per quarter, up from 4.3 in early 2023 (Ashby).
Applications per hire surged by 182% from 2021 to 2024, making the hiring process more competitive (Ashby).
Candidate experience
Only 7% of technical candidates and 9% of business candidates who interviewed received offers in 2023 (Glassdoor).
Interviews began a median of six days after availability was requested, with direct booking links boosting same day scheduling from 54% to 72% (Ashby).
AI impact
An estimated 27% of the workforce could be disrupted by generative AI (Gartner).
70% of HR leaders plan to reallocate employees due to AI gains (Gartner).
Learning and development
67% of employees would stay with a company if offered upskilling opportunities (Gartner).
77% of organizations are increasing their learning team headcount (Ashby).
2025: A spicy year for talent acquisition
This year is shaping up to be one of the most competitive and fast changing years for hiring yet. The battle between candidate AI and recruiter AI is in full swing. Small internal talent teams are fading. Interviewing is shifting to combat AI fraud, and employer branding is back in the spotlight.
The biggest takeaway? Companies that stay flexible, data driven, and human focused will win.
At HighlightTA, we built our business for exactly this type of environment. The future of hiring is fast, adaptable, and deeply connected to real business needs.
Here’s to a big year ahead. Let’s get after it.
Need flexible hiring support in 2025? Let’s chat.