HR trends for 2025: Do more with less in recruitment, onboarding and training

In 2024, a survey conducted by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) revealed that 47% of professionals found it more difficult to recruit than in 2023.

This finding reflects the complexity of the current challenges facing HR teams. Against a global backdrop of talent shortages, organizations are looking for more expert profiles with ever more specific skills.

Yet the lifespan of these skills is getting shorter by the day, and is now estimated at 2 years for technical skills (OECD). This obsolescence of skills is combined with the need to constantly optimize HR budgets and, as with many corporate functions today, the need to do more with less.

Despite these constraints, Ellyn Shook, former CHRO at Accenture, shows that the role of HR teams is becoming increasingly strategic in organizations. In 2025, it will be essential for these teams to take account of the challenges posed by hybrid working and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). They will also have to pay particular attention to data, and equip themselves to measure the ROI of their actions in order to continuously improve their support for the business.

In this guide, you will find practical tips and actions for implementing effective new HR strategies in three key areas: recruitment, onboarding, and training.

1. Becoming a driving force in recruitment in 2025

A context that focuses recruitment on key skills

There are several reasons why the talent shortage is making the recruitment process more complex for HR teams:

• More job offers in companies than demand on the market: the average global unemployment rate remains at 5.2% according to the ILO (International Labour Organization);
• Fewer jobs for young professionals and graduates;
• Companies are looking for increasingly targeted profiles and skills.

Today, organizations are tending to adopt a human resources management approach that is often skill-based. Deloitte shows that this approach enables them to be more agile, and to better adapt to rapid changes in the market.

However, the profiles with the most sought-after skills are more often than not already employed. This means that HR teams have to invest additional time and resources in hunting down these passive candidates, thereby increasing the cost of recruitment for companies (which already averages $2,700 per job opening).

Added to this are the costs incurred by creating a recruitment procedure that 92% of candidates will not follow, and which will be aimed at only 30% of them, the rest being passive candidates who will go through another channel.

Identify the skills you need

In 2025, it will be essential for HR teams and business managers looking for talent to understand which skills they are missing. This will enable them to determine whether recruitment is necessary, or whether in-house upskilling might be a better option.

HR's global view of the workforce can also provide food for thought, while encouraging internal mobility.

To do this, you need to put in place effective cross-functional collaboration, and eliminate any communication silos that may exist between business lines and support functions.

At this stage, the HR team needs to be proactive, and not hesitate to question the recruitment needs expressed by managers. Instead of recruiting external talent, it may be more cost-effective to develop the skills of existing employees or promote internal mobility.

By anticipating future skills needs, HR teams can provide organizations with a long-term vision. With recruitment channels multiplying (social networks, marketplaces, headhunting agencies, trade fairs, etc.), they can identify the key skills required at each stage of a company's development, so they can provide managers with appropriate responses even before a need is formulated.

Stand out from the crowd

Each recruitment process is unique, but they all have one thing in common: they are all evaluation situations, both for the company and for the candidate.

Today, with ATS (Application Tracking Systems) and artificial intelligence making it possible to process an increasing number of applications, the most effective way of standing out as a recruiter is to engage candidates directly from the initial selection phases.

By actively involving them, you hold their attention and give them the means to express themselves more freely.

Adopting an engaging and inclusive approach allows you to:

1. Identify the best profiles quickly;
2. Assess them appropriately.

This approach may vary depending on the type of position to be filled, but the objective remains the same: to offer an enriching experience right from the first contact.

1. Expert in a specific skill

When it comes to recruiting for specialist expertise, in-depth individual interviews and case studies are often necessary.

In this case, a collaboration platform like Klaxoon can help you prepare and structure these discussions, for example using Board, its visual whiteboard. There are a number of ready-to-use templates for quickly organizing your Boards with a view to a discussion or a case study, including the template Conducting a job interview.

In this way, you interact with your candidate in a single interactive workspace with integrated video conferencing, and can analyze their skills in real time or asynchronously with the managers concerned.

2. Young graduates

At student recruitment fairs, it can also be difficult to stand out from the multitude of companies present.

One solution might be to organize interactive workshops during the event (hackathons, for example), so that candidates can discover your company's culture in a fun and engaging way.

Running these workshops on Klaxoon is a way of generating engagement (with visual activities such as quizzes or gamified courses), but also of identifying the most promising profiles more easily.

2. Offering a successful onboarding experience

Promote cohesion and first impressions

Onboarding is a key moment for strengthening the cohesion between the recruitment experience and the employer brand.

In an increasingly competitive environment, it is essential to offer your new employees an induction experience that reflects the company's value proposition. By making a good impression from the very first day, you are giving yourself the means to retain your new employees over the long term.

For example, US consumer goods company Rich has revised its HR strategy for 2021 to maximize the impact of the 'moments that matter’ in an employee's life. For Rich, these are the moments when engagement and transparency are essential for professional development.

This approach is inspired by the practices used in customer support.

Onboarding is one of the nine key moments identified by Rich. To succeed at this stage, the company relies on active listening to its employees. By gathering feedback from new recruits, it establishes a cycle of continuous improvement that enables the onboarding experience to be refined.

To integrate this approach into your own organization, several methods can be implemented, including:

• A fresh eyes report;
• A retrospective;
• A survey to gather feedback effectively.

Equip managers for effective onboarding

According to Gartner, investing in the development of managers and leaders is the number one priority for HR trends in 2025. To ensure the successful onboarding of new employees, it is essential that managers are well-prepared, have the right reflexes and know how to support their new colleagues effectively.

The key is to move from theory to practice for each new team member, and this can be done through tailored management development programs that combine :

• Learning through training (in the form of visual aids or sequenced sessions) ;
• Peer-to-peer interaction;
• Practical application.

Finally, to ensure that managers stay in touch with their teams, it is important to set up regular exchanges. For example, conducting one-one-one interviews and debriefing the fresh eyes report, both on the HR side and on the manager's side, enables the onboarding process to be continually improved.

Personalize onboarding with constructive interaction

A new employee's first few days in a company are often marked by a huge amount of information to assimilate.

To avoid this cognitive overload, it is essential to structure your onboarding process so that information is easily accessible at all times.

With a collaboration platform like Klaxoon, you can centralize and structure all the key resources your new employees need in one place, reducing their mental load from the outset:

• The organizational chart ;
• A list of the team's tools and their access links;
• Some practical information;
• Key contacts;
• Key documents and their access links,...

These elements can all be brought together on a dedicated Board or Network, which new arrivals can consult at their own pace, from anywhere.

Thanks to visual management, Klaxoon also makes it easier to retain information, and encourages effective exchanges. At any time, employees can use the Question tool to ask questions of the HR team and/or their colleagues, and receive answers directly linked to the resources concerned.

In this way, onboarding becomes an iterative process, where each interaction with the new employee contributes to their integration, while providing HR with avenues for improving their methods. Thanks to this collaborative workspace, new employees quickly become proactive and respond to the company's needs.

3. Ensuring continuous and sustainable employee training

AI, one of the challenges for skills development

According to a PwC study, 67% of employees say they could leave their organization if it does not offer them skills development opportunities.

At a time when artificial intelligence is transforming more and more businesses, it is vital that teams are constantly upgrading their skills. Erin Scruggs, Head of talent acquisition at LinkedIn, highlights this correlation as follows:

For this reason, soft skills have become essential. These human skills, such as communication, collaboration and creativity, are increasingly in demand, as they cannot be automated by AI.

Companies that invest in the development of these skills can not only strengthen their resilience in the face of change, but also offer their employees opportunities for personal development, in order to control internal turnover and the associated costs.

Although many employees are also willing to learn about AI, most organizations do not yet have a comprehensive strategy to support their employees effectively. Accenture estimates that 75% of companies are not ready to provide a good employee experience when it comes to AI.

To meet this need without increasing your costs, it is essential to facilitate the knowledge transfer and encourage on-the-job training. While AI, like any other tool, can help your teams to structure their thinking, humans should always remain the driving force.

Maximizing digital learning for effective hybrid training

These trends show that today's HR and Learning & Development (L&D) teams need to adapt their training methods to meet the challenges posed by fast-moving professions and the need to cut costs.

In addition to on-the-job training, digital learning (or online training) is a particularly effective approach in a hybrid context. The aim is to offer flexible learning paths, tailored to the needs of each learner, while encouraging their engagement at any time and from anywhere.

Participant engagement is essential to the success of a training course, and even more so in a hybrid format, where distance can reduce interaction.

So how do you unleash the full potential of digital learning in your organization? With a collaboration platform like Klaxoon, you can generate engagement and interactivity in your online training courses, both synchronously and asynchronously:

• Centralize the resources to be consulted before or after the course in a Board or Memo.
• Actively involve learners and challenge them with Quizzes or Questions.
• Gamify training with Missions or Adventures.
• Offer a training session that combines several interactive activities.
• Organize training content in Networks for each group of learners.

Monitoring progress and evaluate learning effectively

Finally, to assess the return on investment (ROI) of your training courses and justify budgets from year to year, it is essential to implement effective progress monitoring, and to accurately assess the knowledge acquired by learners.

With this in mind, today's collaboration and learning solutions are increasingly equipped with this type of functionality. With Klaxoon, for example, you can access a comprehensive dashboard to track engagement statistics for each of your activities:

• Total number of participants ;
• Activity participation rate, demonstrating their involvement on an individual level;
• Activity or training progress level, etc.

In addition, performance reviews or individual HR reviews can also be included in this workspace. Managers and HR teams can access this information in real time, without having to switch tools, to facilitate communication and ensure continuous monitoring of employee development.

Conclusion

In 2025, HR managers and steering committee members will need to identify and carefully measure the impact of each of their recruitment, onboarding and training actions. In a fast-changing labor market, the ability to anticipate and adapt quickly will be essential if organizations are to maintain their performance and competitiveness.

By leveraging innovative solutions like Klaxoon, HR teams can optimize their processes and increase engagement with employees, candidates, learners and internal stakeholders. Thanks to this guide, you now have all the keys you need to make the most of your resources and implement an HR strategy with lasting impact.