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, UK talent leaders 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 organisations in the UK already doing to stay ahead? LinkedIn’s 2025 UK 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 the candidate experience, and advising hiring managers. Organisations are getting the message.

Adoption among recruiting teams is growing, with 45% of UK organisations now “actively integrating” or “experimenting” with Gen AI tools, up from 31% a year ago.

Octopus Energy is leveraging AI to enhance its recruitment efforts with a focus on improving outcomes allowing recruiters to do more. “We don’t use AI to filter people out; we use it to make our teams smarter and more efficient,” says Olivia Brown, Head of Talent Acquisition at Octopus Energy. By utilising LinkedIn AI-assisted InMails, Octopus Energy were able to achieve a 55% average response rate, 15% above industry benchmarks, and became faster and more efficient without compromising the human touch that is critical to recruiting.

But with these benefits comes new responsibilities, and TA teams aren’t shying away from them. Recruiters themselves recognise that they need to bulk up their AI skills to keep up with the changes.

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 Stefan Renzewitz, Group Head of Talent Acquisition at Computacenter, will use AI to drive efficiencies and facilitate more personal interactions."With AI now capable of handling many technical tasks, recruiters can focus more on being trusted partners for candidates and strategic consultants for hiring managers,” Stefan says. “This will enable them to be effective influencers for both of these key stakeholders."

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 UK were 11x more likely to list “relationship development” as a required skill for recruiters on a paid job post when compared to last year.

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What talent leaders have to say…

Hiring the best person for the job has always been a central component of recruiting, but it is now more critical than ever. The platform insights in this report measure quality of hire as a combination of demand, retention, and internal mobility — though there is no universal formula. Volatile business conditions are increasing demand for quality hires who can adapt to rapid change.

"Focusing on key conversion metrics at each stage of the hiring funnel and regularly analysing candidate sources to identify which channels yield the highest-quality hires is essential to refining hiring strategies," said James Edwards of Greene King.

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 therefore unsurprising, that 88% of UK TA pros in the UK 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 19% of professionals 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, 56% of UK TA professionals believe AI can improve how they measure quality of hire, reflecting optimism about its potential to solve longstanding challenges in recruitment.

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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.

What talent leaders have to say…

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, 93% of UK TA pros believe accurately assessing a candidate’s skills is crucial for improving quality of hire. 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. This allows recruiters to allocate more time to candidate conversations as AI automates basic recruitment tasks.

45% of UK TA pros already integrating or experimenting with GAI say the time saved by GAI goes towards candidate sourcing, while 18% say they use the time saved to focus on skill assessments.

By focusing on what candidates can do — not just where they’ve been — skills-based hiring unlocks untapped potential and removes bias from the hiring process providing more opportunities to underrepresented groups. Not only does this approach expand access to talent, but it also 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.

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What talent leaders have to say…

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., 11x 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 UK talent teams

AI deployment is accelerating — but challenges loom

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

56% of UK TA pros 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

Final thoughts

Final thoughts

Global report

Staffing report

Regional data cuts

Translated reports

Methodology

Platform insights

Survey data

Censuswide survey data

Acknowledgments

Survey research

Platform insights

Editorial and production