The Future of Recruiting 2025

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As AI continues to transform the world of work, few will be more affected than recruiters. Not only will recruiters be responsible for hiring the AI-enabled workforce of the future, but they’ll also be using AI to streamline repetitive tasks, allowing them to do their jobs faster and more effectively.

AI won’t just make recruiters more efficient, it has the potential to elevate recruiters’ roles and make them pivotal to achieving organisational success. By embracing AI, talent leaders across Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg (Benelux) can fundamentally improve how they identify, assess, and hire the right talent in a skills-driven economy.

What do talent teams need to do to make the most of AI? What are some organisations already doing to stay ahead? LinkedIn’s 2025 Benelux Future of Recruiting report will help you understand how AI is reshaping recruiting and reveal how harnessing AI effectively can help meet critical recruiting goals such as improving Quality of Hire and Skills-Based Hiring.

AI is reshaping hiring from the ground up, transforming the role of recruiters along the way. By automating time-consuming recruiting tasks, generative AI (GAI) is speeding up the hiring process, allowing recruiters to spend more time on strategic activities like building relationships, improving candidate experience, and advising hiring managers. Organisations are getting the message.

Adoption among recruiting teams is growing, with 37% of organisations across Europe now “actively integrating” or “experimenting” with Gen AI tools, up from 26% a year ago.

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But recruiters won’t just need AI skills — they’ll need human skills too. Those who want to stand out from the crowd will need to master skills that can’t be easily replicated by GAI, such as relationship building, communication, and adaptability.

The best recruiters, says John Vlastelica, founder and CEO of Recruiting Toolbox, will become talent advisors who work with candidates who need the human touch to guide them on major career decisions. “They will be much more of a career coach, working with candidates who have more complicated situations,” John says. “They will be providing more of an executive recruiter kind of experience.”

With AI set to take over mundane tasks, employers are increasingly looking for recruiters who can take on more strategic roles. Demand for recruiters who have relationship-building skills, for instance, has surged. Employers in The Netherlands were 14x more likely to list “relationship development” as a required skill for recruiters on a paid job post than last year.

Top skills increasingly required of TA pros in the Netherlands

Ensuring you hire the best person for the job has always been a central component of recruiting, but it’s becoming even more important now. Volatile business conditions and economic pressures highlight the need to build talent pools of skilled, adaptable hires. “By having the right combination of employer branding, recruitment marketing, and talent acquisition, Swisscom builds strong talent networks that align with its values and needs,” said David Luyet of Swisscom. “This approach improves both the quality and speed of hiring over time."

Another reason quality of hire is taking center stage: Employers have learned a lesson from the hiring binges of 2021 and 2022, when filling open slots quickly was the top priority, leading to some poor hiring decisions. With hiring now slower and more deliberate, organisations aim to ensure every hire contributes meaningfully to success.

It’s not surprising then, that as many as 90% of TA pros in Benelux agree it will become increasingly important to measure quality of hire. Continuously assessing the value of recent hires offers valuable insights into recruitment effectiveness and informs improvements. However, only 35% of recruiters in Benelux report confidence in their organisation’s ability to measure this effectively.

But AI is poised to help in measuring the elusive metric with tools that can streamline and enhance the measurement of quality of hire by:

• Analysing employee performance data to identify trends and benchmark success factors revealing which hiring strategies consistently yield top performers.

• Predicting long-term success by uncovering patterns in candidate attributes and post-hire outcomes.

• Standardising evaluations and eliminating unconscious biases that can skew perceptions of candidate quality.

In fact, 66% of TA professionals in Benelux believe AI can improve how they measure quality of hire, reflecting optimism about its potential to solve longstanding challenges in recruitment.

Organisations are likewise optimistic about AI’s potential to improve their ability to source and hire the best candidates. Siemens, for instance, is using AI tools to gain more accurate assessments of candidates’ skills and potential.

“AI-powered tools can analyse vast amounts of data to identify candidates with the highest likelihood of success, offering predictive insights that go beyond resumes and conventional interviews,” Salma Rashad said.

Employers known for delivering on certain candidate priorities are more likely to make a quality hire.

Develop success profiles, i.e. the common attributes of the best performers at the organisation;
Create an assessment process that uses these standards as a benchmark for evaluating candidates;
Validate the quality of your hires with post-hire surveys of hiring managers.

Skills-based hiring – the practice of hiring based on candidates’ skills, and not on the degrees they might have or their job history – is becoming an increasingly important priority in a rapidly shifting economy. As employers strive to keep up with advances in technology, they’re seeking employees who have certain skills — including AI skills — to fill skill gaps.

In fact, nine out of ten TA pros believe accurately assessing a candidate’s skills is crucial for improving quality of hire. And in fact, LinkedIn data shows that companies with the most skills-based searches are +12% more likely to make a quality hire.

Skills-based hiring can be challenging and time-consuming – but AI is poised to change that. AI tools can help recruiters analyse resumes to uncover skills, automate skills assessments, remove bias from the hiring process, and more.

The increase in efficiency provided by AI in automating basic recruitment tasks has allowed recruiters to allocate more time to candidate conversations and to act as strategic advisors to clients and candidates. Sentiment around AI use in the workplace has sharply increased, with 60% of TA professionals in Benelux agreeing that AI has made hiring for skills easier.

By focusing on what candidates can do — not just where they’ve been — skills-based hiring unlocks untapped potential. Not only does this approach expand access to talent, it drives better alignment between candidates and roles, translating into more quality hires and long-term success. It’s no wonder that employers are increasingly dropping degree requirements: In 2023, 26% of paid job posts on LinkedIn didn’t require a degree, compared to 22% in 2020 — a difference of 4 percentage points that translates into +16% increase.

Increase in job posts without degree requirements

Platform insights for this report were derived from the billions of data points generated by the 1 billion members in over 200 countries on LinkedIn today. Talent acquisition (TA) professionals are LinkedIn members with a recruiting role. To measure the growth of TA pros learning AI skills, we compared the number of skills explicitly added by members over a 12-month period (October 2023 to September 2024) against the previous 12-month period (October 2022 to September 2023). AI skills include AI literacy skills, which made up the great majority of what TA pros were learning (as opposed to AI engineering skills). Learn more here.

For skills increasingly mentioned in paid job posts for recruiting roles, only skills explicitly mentioned in a job description are included. The odds ratio (e.g., 14x increase in relationship-building skill requirements) is calculated as the share of job posts that require a particular skill in the last 12 months (Nov 2023 - Oct 2024) vs. the share of job posts requiring that same skill in the preceding 12 months (Nov 2022 - Oct 2023).

For quality of hire analyses, we measured quality by giving equal weight to three measures: demand (whether the hire was in high demand, i.e., top 25% of members receiving InMails from recruiters within 1 year before hire); retention (whether the hire stayed at least one year at the company of hire); and mobility (whether the hire moved to a second role within the company within a year of the initial hire). Note: these are the best metrics available via LinkedIn platform data, though calculating quality of hire at your own company is typically calculated with internal data.

Companies using AI-Assisted Messaging the most are those within the top quartile, measured by the share of all InMails sent that were AI-assisted. Companies with the most skills-based searches are those who have a disproportionate share (25% or more) of recruiters within the top quartile for performing searches on LinkedIn using the skills filter.

Employers known for delivering on certain candidate priorities are those within the top quartile as measured by LinkedIn’s Talent Drivers survey, which asks members how well they think companies provide various benefits to employees. Talent Drivers data includes responses on over 1,250 companies as of October 2024.

For the paid job postings without degree requirements, this report follows the same methodology found here with data from the complete calendar years of 2020 and 2023.

How AI redefines recruiting excellence

Moving beyond routine work to drive strategic impact for Benelux talent teams

AI deployment is accelerating — but challenges loom

What talent leaders have to say…

Organisations are getting serious about hiring the best possible candidates — and measuring the results

66% of TA pros in Benelux believe AI can improve how they measure quality of hire.

What talent leaders have to say…

As employers strive to fill skills gaps, skills-based hiring is gaining steam

What talent leaders have to say…

Final thoughts

Final thoughts

Global reports

Staffing report

Regional data cuts

Translated reports

Methodology

Platform insights

Survey data

Censuswide survey data

Acknowledgments

Editorial and production

Survey research

Platform insights