Welcome to 2025!

It’s difficult to believe that 2024 is over already. With the ups and downs in the pharma, medtech and healthcare talent markets linked to fluctuations in inflation, interest rates and the change in Government, for a lot of us it almost felt like we were just getting started.

Though tumultuous, what the past year has really underscored for those of us in the recruitment game is the absolute and overriding need for flexibility and adaptability in hiring strategy. With the market seemingly poised to turn on the head of a pin, organisations lacking the ability to move swiftly to capitalise on opportunities and shore up emergent weaknesses are at risk of being left far behind their competition.

With that in mind, we’ve come up with 4 key areas we think everyone looking to hire in 2025 should focus on:

  • AI and Automation
  • Candidate Experience
  • Source Diversification
  • Data

Let’s look at each in turn and see how investing in these core areas can help to carry your talent function through the next twelve months.

Embrace AI and Automation in Recruitment

Most of us are at least casually familiar with ChatGPT, and some of us may have even dabbled in using generative AI to help with tasks like writing or research. The potential for AI in recruitment though goes far beyond simply helping us get to a finished product more quickly. The judicious deployment of AI-driven tools across your recruitment cycle can improve colleague efficiency by reducing the time spent on mundane tasks, freeing them up to focus on doing what they do best.

AI Recruitment Tools to Consider

Conversational chatbots have come on leaps and bounds in the past 18 months. They’re no longer just for informational queries or getting help with processes – they’re sophisticated partners that you can confidently integrate into your hiring process.

The best-in-class example of this is probably Paradox’s Olivia AI.

Olivia can competently handle almost any recruitment job you can throw at her – be it crafting and posting job ads, screening candidates and CVs, delivering employer branding content to applicants, scheduling interviews, making offers, and more besides.

No system is perfect and Olivia is no exception – and interacting with a chatbot will never be a satisfactory replacement for interacting with a human – but when hiring for large teams or at scale, it’s difficult to see how she wouldn’t help lighten your load.

We’ll be diving into different ways to use AI in recruitment a little later on in January – make sure you check back for the full story!

Candidate Experience

What does your hiring experience look like for prospects? Do you just fire out job ads left right and centre and hope to find the right fit, or do you try, from the outset, to integrate your potential new starter into your company’s culture?

Employer branding can feel a bit opaque, but it gets easier when you think of it in terms of employee attraction and retention. When it comes to making candidates – and their time – feel valued, designing your application experience with attraction in mind is a no-brainer.

For 2025, take your application experience back to brass tacks – look at it honestly and ask yourself, “if I was thinking about joining our company, what does this process tell me about it and its culture?”

Source Diversification

It’s no longer viable to centre your recruitment efforts around just one stream. Companies that only use a specific job board, their own website, or social media for their hiring needs are cutting themselves off from a talent pool that’s spread itself far and wide. With more places than ever to choose from, candidates are congregating around specific channels less and less. The name of the game is diversification – being everywhere that candidates are, and meeting them at their level.

In 2025, make it a goal to expand into new sourcing channels. That could be exploring the world of niche job boards, retargeting visitors to your careers page through digital ads, wading into the world of LinkedIn or bringing a specialist organisation, like Evolve, on board.

As a specialised recruitment consultancy with over 17 years of experience, Evolve is recognised as the top agency of its kind for sourcing fresh candidates in pharma, medtech and healthcare. Our strategy follows this principle of diversification to a T – we don’t rely simply on what works, we’re constantly on the lookout for new methods for sourcing and securing the very best talent in our markets.

Data

As a hiring manager, you deal with huge volumes of data every day. Is it simply sitting in your CRM/ATS, or are you leveraging it to your advantage?

Getting a handle on your cost-to-hire, time-to-hire, acceptance and attrition rates are an obvious and important place to start, but just as important is using the data you bring in to tailor communications, processes and experiences to individuals. A big trend in 2024 was personalisation, and we see this as an area only set to grow in 2025.

Consider targeting communications towards prospects based on different metrics: time since last contact (longer = worse), previous success in your recruitment processes (so-called “second place finishers”), career stage, etc…once you dig into the data, the possibilities are endless!

Wrapping It Up

Recruitment is changing – but, in a sense, that’s nothing new! We wish you a year filled with celebrating successes, rolling with the punches and ultimately coming out on top.

Just remember – you don’t have to go on this journey alone. Evolve’s suite of employee attraction and retention services are at your fingertips:

  • First-class permanent recruitment solutions, delivered strategically and in partnership
  • Flexible and affordable contract and outsourced solutions – from single individuals, to entire teams
  • Game-changing employer branding services – including our cutting-edge CompanyPeek microsites

Get in touch today to discover how we can help you have a happy and prosperous 2025.

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