Customer experience has long been considered the crux of good business. The same is true of creating a good work environment. Listen to and treat your customers—in this case internal customers, better known as employees—and they’ll work hard and be loyal. But what about before they’re a customer or an employee? Prospecting is an important part of most businesses, and in HR, it goes by the name of recruiting. While historically there’s been an emphasis on choosing the right candidate, it’s also crucial to ensure the right talent finds your company.
It’s now easier than ever for jobseekers to identify opportunities and apply—sometimes with just the click of a button. And while the application process itself has become streamlined, the evaluation and selection process has remained too focused on areas that don’t necessarily move the needle.
For example, experience and hard skills are important, but they may not be a true predictor of long-term candidate, and thus company, success. On the other hand, many artificial intelligence (AI) tools meant to make the process easier are flawed, focusing on keywords rather than the full picture.
Fortunately, strategic HR leaders understand this, giving way to new approaches and tools to make recruiting and hiring more intelligent and productive. It’s why I believe 2025 will be the year of the candidate experience (CX). The ability to identify (and appeal to) talent early on by recognizing potential, valuable soft skills, offering growth opportunities to achieve success, and finding the right AI tools to help will emerge as big themes this year.
Here are several trends that will shape CX in 2025:
1. Candidate Engagement Tools will Get a Facelift
Candidate engagement tools, such as recruiting chatbots, will experience significant improvements. Advances in AI have resulted in more personalized communication, predictive analytics, and seamless integration with ATS and CRM systems. Enhanced mobile optimization, interactive content like video messaging, and inclusive outreach strategies improve candidate experiences, while bias-reduction features promote diversity. Tools also support candidate nurturing through talent pools and skill development recommendations. This helps enhance communication, efficiency, and help recruiters better connect with talent in an increasingly noisy and competitive job market.
2. Potential will Go Head-to-Head with Experience
As roles become more dynamic and new generations enter the workforce, it’s becoming increasingly important to consider factors beyond hard skills and experiences as predictors of success. For example, recent college graduates will have little on-the-job experience, but may have soft skills that can and should influence their professional journey. That can be even more valuable to prospective employers than years of experience. Not only does this even the playing field for job seekers—both people starting out and those looking to make a career change—but also helps widen and diversify the talent pool.
3. HR will Continue to Contend with AI
Not only do employers need to contend with AI in the recruitment process, but also by jobseekers. While some uses of AI simply equate to harmless time-savings—a prospect sifting through jobs and finding ones to apply to, for example—other applications are not so cut-and-dry. In the case of an applicant using AI to optimize their resume to better fit a specific company or job description, this can highlight misleading information about their aptitude. A bigger emphasis on soft skills—critical thinking, communication, and adaptability—can help mitigate some of the AI-optimized misrepresentation, as they’re a lot harder to fake.
4. Personalized Learning & Development will Reign Supreme
So, you’ve recruited a candidate and they’ve accepted the offer. Now, onto the next challenge: keeping them engaged in their new role. Learning and development (L&D) has been proven to help in this area, and thankfully there’s no shortage of learning content. What’s harder is finding the right learning content and strategy to truly further an individual’s ability to succeed.
It’s critical that HR professionals unlock this content through a personalized lens. Using learning assessments to create a model of success for any given role by learning from your existing data, and then applying it at the individual level can help team members focus on the skills most important to them and finding success in their respective roles.
Research shows that the average corporate job opening attracts 250 resumes (Zippia). Despite this, nearly 9 in 10 hiring managers (86%) say it’s challenging to find the talent they need, according to Robert Half. Focusing on an optimal CX can help reduce this by finding the right candidates and predicting their success on the job, so HR isn’t left to fill the same role shortly thereafter. It will be exciting to see new capabilities in CX unfold over the next year, so stay tuned!
Gershon Goren is the founder and CEO of Cangrade. An accomplished technologist and entrepreneur, he led the engineering group at Webdialogs, a provider of online meeting and communication solutions acquired by IBM. Following the acquisition Gershon acted as chief software architect in the Lotus group of IBM, delivering LotusLive (now known as IBM SmartCloud), a cloud-based collaboration suite. After IBM he was involved in a number of different ventures, but ultimately decided to focus on Cangrade’s mission of leveling the playing field for job seekers.
