Hiring and Recruitment Advertising Trend Predictions for 2025

Hiring signals, the rise of LinkedIn, and AI recruitment bot wars.

2024 was a tough year for recruitment advertising across the world. After a decade of almost continuous growth between 2012–2022 and a lightning-fast recovery after COVID-19 2023 and 2024 were the first years where job advertising and online recruitment suffered significantly after 2008’s financial crisis. 

Public market companies like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and Seek posted consecutive negative growth quarters, and new terms like “white collar recession” and the “Great Stay” were created to describe an unusual feeling of uneasiness in the labor markets. Yes, unemployment numbers might not have skyrocketed and the reduction of employees’ record churn post-Covid (the Great Stay followed the Great Employee Churn) might be the key reason we see such drops in job ad numbers—but the fact remains that hiring is in a recession for now almost two years in a row. 

Beyond online recruitment, one needs only to look at the financial performance of the bigger companies in the staffing sector, Randstad, Adecco, Manpower, and many other global leaders posted consecutive quarters of negative revenue growth. 

But anyone who is experienced in labor market economics knows that this is a cyclical market. With long-term factors like demographics pointing to labor market shortages and a rebounding US economy bolstered by the change of administration, the only question mark that remains is: When will we see a strong rebound of hiring across the world?

Prediction 1: Rebound and growth in job advertising

Some point out the risk of AI replacing jobs at scale, but our experience with previous technological advances is that even if AI replaces some jobs, the productivity boost in the economy would mean that jobs will be created elsewhere and this type of structural labor market re-alignment will take some time as well. 

Already, Veritone Hire’s research conducted throughout the year with the collaboration of our friends at Aspen Tech Labs shows that AI is also rapidly creating high-paid jobs in the US today. Research by the World Economic Forum says even more emphatically that AI and Big Data will be the hottest skill in the labor market and predicts AI will contribute to create twice as many jobs as the ones lost till 2030.

So our first prediction (even if it’s not evident immediately and the pace of recovery might be different in areas of the economy or the world) is that we expect to see job advertising rebounding to growth at some point in 2025 with key public job board businesses reporting growth in job ad numbers and revenue. 

Prediction 2: Greater focus on quality of hire and cost-per-qualified-application

Job advertising giants like Indeed, LinkedIn, Seek, and Stepstone aren’t sitting and expecting the hiring market to rebound; the pressure on their businesses over the last few years led them to seek solutions to grow their addressable market, value to clients, and (eventually) their share of wallet. 

Looking at what their CEOs shared publicly, one thing stands out: all these players are looking at the staffing market that’s estimated to be 10 times the size of the online advertising markets and are setting their crosshairs to get a larger piece of the global recruitment pie. As Indeed’s Chris Hymes said in a major investor presentation, “The first monetization level is increasing the take-rate of cost-per-hire.” 

Indeed’s key strategy to achieve this is to get as close as possible to hiring by optimizing recruitment outcomes for employers. Hiring budget optimization is also a way to maintain client revenue and grow market share in a down market, that is why all of us are looking to promote data-driven recruitment and use programmatic advertising and targeting technologies fed by rich hiring signals through deeper integration with the recruitment tech stack (mainly integrations between job boards, job ad tech platforms, and ATSs). One only needs to look at the integration program of Indeed mirrored almost instantly by LinkedIn, Stepstone, and Seek, and the growth of ATS integration providers like Merge, Kombo, Bindbee, JobSync, and others to understand the aligned efforts in that direction. 

At Veritone Hire we are also laser-focused at collecting more hiring signals. We believe recruiter down-funnel data is critical to achieve higher quality applicants and move our clients’ focus from managing cost-per-application to cost-per-quality application and eventually cost-per-hire. Application data (combined from our client campaigns and the conversion outcomes we collect from their ATSs on candidate statuses) is key to informing the machine learning algorithms that drive our campaign decisions. It’s also easily available to inform client decisions through dashboards that integrate data from multiple sources.

It’s music to our ears when Indeed is starting to set quantitative targets to collect such hiring signals from employers and we are there to support them in that complex integration process while making sure they fully benefit from the improvements in the accuracy and efficiency of their ad campaigns.

Our second prediction is that in 2025 focus on quality of hire and cost-per-qualified-application will become a standard term in the job ad market while pay-for-performance advertising models will quickly gain market share from pay-for-duration models in the ad market. 

Prediction 3: The rise of LinkedIn

One of the reasons that we have such a strong belief in data-driven recruitment is the rise of a global job board that collects the most data on candidates’ skills and employment preferences, combines these with rich business-to-business communication, and is considered to be the de facto leading professional network in the world—LinkedIn. 

I know what you’re thinking: LinkedIn is a social network, not just another job board. I’m not disagreeing with you, but what I am predicting is that in 2025 recruiters will realize that LinkedIn is also the biggest job board in the world and will continue to grow in market share to become the undisputed leader in the market, eventually surpassing Indeed. 

For veterans of the job advertising industry, LinkedIn always had the potential to be the “One Job Board to Rule Them All” (in the words of Tolkien) but for many years did not fulfill that clear potential by focusing on other areas of its business model. 

Beyond becoming the world’s favorite resume/profile database, we see clear signs that LinkedIn is aiming to become the top destination for employers to post jobs. From introducing the Pay for Performance model to mirroring Indeed’s deep ATS integration plans with LinkedIn Apply Connect and introducing AI agents to help candidates in their job search and application journey, LinkedIn is, for the first time, showing a clear game plan to pursue global job ad market domination. At Veritone Hire, we aim to be the first programmatic advertising partner that will introduce LinkedIn Pay-for-Performance offerings on a global scale.

Our third prediction for 2025 is that LinkedIn will quickly become the second pay-for-performance job board globally (behind Indeed), recruitment marketers will recognize it more as their top source of applications and candidate traffic, and LinkedIn will focus on challenging Indeed’s leading position in job content. 

Prediction 4: More automation and AI, no recruiter-applicant bot wars.

Finally, as we enter 2025, the current suppressed labor market means that employers’ focus has shifted from quantity of hires to quality of hires. At the same time, the genAI revolution is bringing a need for new skills—the rapid re-skilling of workers and continuous change in the type of work and jobs will be required in the future. 

Secondary repercussions of this fight for quality and skills is the rise of omnichannel access to quality candidates. We see more and more employers focused on attracting audiences outside job board destinations looking to include social media and proactive search and candidate engagement as part of their recruitment efforts. AI agents and chatbots to support the application process and screening of candidates are becoming smarter and more ubiquitous. 

While many talk about the potential tsunamis of poor applications that will inhibit recruiters, we believe the opposite is true. With the ability to scale matching and screening, and the agents’ ability to shorten candidate applications and improve candidate engagement, we predict that the quality outcomes of matching candidates to jobs will improve. Programmatic advertising and sourcing technologies will improve and provide superior recruiting outcomes at lower cost revolutionizing the staffing industry and the applicant experience in the process. 

Our fourth and final prediction for 2025 is that we will not experience recruiter-applicant bot wars, but a rising tide of AI and automation in the recruitment process with major job boards, ATSs, and job ad platforms. This will widely introduce AI, AI agents, and automation to support jobseekers and recruiters. 

Final thoughts

Skills-based recruitment is a process that can be vastly improved by data, automation, and AI. Veritone Hire proves this daily with our wide adoption of dynamic targeting, real-time bidding, and enhanced targeting algorithmic campaign management. We still need recruiters and hiring managers to manage elements such as matching values and expectations, but the whole industry’s productivity will be vastly improved by automating the mundane. Some of the biggest players in the industry like LinkedIn, Indeed, Workday, Bullhorn, and SmartRecruiters, and some emerging leaders like Paradox and Fountain are pointing in the same direction.

To learn more about Veritone Hire, request a demo or contact a team member.