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.  

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