Recruitment Marketing in 2025: AI, Employer Branding, and Emerging Media

The U.S. labor market has definitively cooled after the employment boom during the pandemic recovery years, with some experts thinking we’ve been treading water as a white-collar recession looms. Looking to the year ahead, job advertising and recruitment marketing teams will continue to focus on quality-of-hire, experiment with AI and automation in their processes, diversify media investments to include more emerging channels, and work to improve employer brand.     

Neil Costa, CEO of HireClix, a recruitment marketing and job advertising agency in the Boston area, discussed these trends with SHRM. 

SHRM: First, what’s the outlook for recruitment marketing budgets in 2025? 

Costa: Generally flat to slightly up. We see a lot of employers keeping advertising investments steady but looking at ways to upgrade their infrastructure. People are spending a lot of money on tools and technologies, so they’re looking at ways to find greater value, save a bit of money, and redirect those resources into employer branding or something else.   

SHRM: What are your predictions for job boards this year?  

Costa: We still see a handful at the top — Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter — and a lot of smaller players hanging around and doing a good job, being effective. We like what companies like JobGet [an on-demand platform for hourly workers] and OfferUp [a mobile-first marketplace competitor to Craigslist] are doing. It’ll be a long way to go to challenge the big brands, but they are finding success in small pockets.  

We’re also finding that organizations are not as bullish on distribution and reach and more focused on quality of applicants. Employers are more mindful of return on investment. They don’t need to hit a hundred job boards, just the ones that will deliver quality candidates. Mass distribution of ads is still being done, but it is a practice that is waning.  

Niche job boards are still going strong. ClearanceJobs for the cleared sector is a good example, or health care job boards like Doximity, that speak directly to the audiences they serve and provide a good experience. There is still a lot of opportunity for the industry-related job boards to succeed.  

SHRM: How will AI impact recruitment marketing? 

Costa: Both Indeed and LinkedIn are promoting their sourcing tools, where they are leveraging AI to develop better outreach and get better responses. They are focusing on a more engaging experience between the recruiter and the job seeker. 

The other thing is employers using AI to help guide candidates on the careers site. I’ve seen a couple of vendors in the space, but we still have a long way to go. There is some good operational work being done right now, capturing leads and scheduling, but there’s an emotional connection to job hunting that the AI is missing. At some point we will start to see conversational AI help the candidate make an emotional connection with the company, the way that a human recruiter can do. But these are still early days. It’s not even dawn — we’re still in the darkness before the dawn. 

The biggest potential impact in the future is going to be when job seekers start using AI agents for job hunting. How will employers respond? How will employers present themselves to a different interface? Think about how that might impact candidate experience.  

SHRM Members-Only Content: Using Artificial Intelligence for Employment PurposesSHRM: Are you still bullish on TikTok and other emerging media? 

Costa: I am. TikTok may not be the direct response channel, but it is an important employer brand channel. It’s very important to deliver employer brand impressions on TikTok and other social media channels. People enjoy consuming content in video snippets.  

We also work with Hulu and other streaming channels on connected TV, where we have access to their advertising platform, taking 15-to-30-second video content and getting in front of job seekers when we’re not competing with as many employers as we would when they are on a job board. 

SHRM: How are careers sites faring these days?      

Costa: The actual native search on career sites can be bad. Let’s say you’ve earned a career site visit. But the search is difficult to navigate. That’s basic. Give job seekers what they want. Another thing is that most companies are failing to protect their brands when it comes to Google and SEO. So many job searches start on Google, and employers want to win their branded searches. Companies would be surprised at how poorly they show up in their own branded job searches. Other job boards that are scraping your jobs are showing up first, and you’re having to pay someone for that traffic that you could have gotten on your own for little or no cost. That’s a big lost opportunity.  

Another painful area for job seekers is the handoff to the ATS [applicant tracking system]. That can be shocking sometimes for the user. You’re on the careers site and apply for a job and suddenly you’re on an unfamiliar ATS login screen.  

Based on any of these things, if you’re a talent acquisition leader and you’re losing 30 to 50% of your careers site visitors, that’s costing you a lot. 

I’d recommend a full careers site audit — showing employers what the careers site is and isn’t doing well. The more careers sites work like modern e-commerce sites, the better conversions you are going to have.

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SHRM: What are the skills areas recruitment marketers need to focus on this year? 

Costa: Content creation is really hard but has to be a focus for recruitment marketers. Identify who on your team is a good content creator and will help create an engaging brand presence for you out in the marketplace.  

We believe that employer brand will make a big difference. It will play a bigger role in a more balanced mix going forward, versus just spraying job ads out there. A lot of employers are still not sure what their employer value proposition is and what their workplace culture should be after the pandemic. If you don’t really know yourself, you’re just putting out generic content that doesn’t connect with people. And worse, if it’s not authentic, it’s misleading.  

The video content I’m seeing being used today is still not where it should be. Just like we went from newspapers to online ads, we will move away from text-heavy job descriptions to video that’s shareable to all the channels where people are spending far more time than they are on job boards. How can we do that in an authentic way? We’re still pretty far behind the curve.   

Lastly, there is always room for improvement when it comes to measuring the success of job advertising and recruitment marketing spend. That’s still an opportunity gap. HR and TA are still struggling to understand what they are getting for what they spend.