Six key trends that will shape firms’ success in 2025

There are six factors that will influence firms’ success in 2025.

The 2025 HR trends and priorities by Always Designing for People (ADP), a global company that provides cloud-based human capital management solutions and business process outsourcing service, examined over 10 major key trends that will determine companies success next year.

However, this article explores only six major key trends such as developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI), skill-building, employees’ well-being, laws and regulations surrounding AI and pay transparency.

In the report, “Unveiling the next anything: Navigating new frontiers in talent, compliance and technology”, 2025 will be a journey of acclimation as leaders adapt to one of the most complex business environments in world history.

Here are the six factors that will determine companies’ success in 2025

Creating a human-centric experience

Access to generative Artificial Intelligence can profoundly shift hiring practices for many organisations. About 85 percent of workers believe AI will impact their jobs in the next two to three years while recruiters and hiring managers are no exception.

However, as HR technologies integrate generative AI, recruitment and candidate platforms may come with built-in generative AI tools. These additions could help recruiters and hiring managers navigate their candidate pools quicker and easier but organisations that want to provide a best-in-class process that supports everyone must keep a human in the loop.

Human oversight helps maintain essential personal connections within the candidate experience, and when it comes to screening and decision making, recruiters and hiring managers could better identify top talent by creating a human-centric recruitment process.

To achieve it, hiring managers need to require human oversight during candidate profile screenings and ensure that the candidate experience is not dominated by impersonal automated responses.

Creating a positive employee experience

The employee experience is what employees see, hear, think and feel about an organisation. It can affect employee morale, brand reputation and customer and client experiences.

According to the report, employees who feel cared for by their employer are 92 percent more likely to feel engaged at work, 65 percent more likely to be loyal and 56 percent more likely to be productive at work.

However, Personalisation enhances the employee experience. Customising tasks to speak to each employee’s unique skills or strengths, emailing announcements from a human leader rather than an automated bot and frequent one-on-one meetings with a direct manager can create a positive employee experience.

During these meetings, managers can facilitate open communication, prioritize flexibility where possible and provide employees with resources. They can also help employees supervise workloads by prioritizing the most important tasks and setting realistic expectations to ensure employees are not overloaded and burnt out.

Implementing a skills-based approach for workforce investment

A skills-based approach to talent shifts the focus of hiring and development from traditional qualifications, such as degrees and industry experience, to the actual skills people bring to help leaders identify the best match for a role, based on a person’s strengths and abilities, regardless of how their skills were acquired.

Although, not only does skills-based hiring align with the evolving needs of the workplace, where adaptability, problem-solving and collaboration are increasingly valued, but it’s also proving to be more effective for organizations.

In the report, about 90 percent of companies using a skills-based hiring method report reducing their mis-hires, and 94 percent agree that skills based hiring is more predictive of on-the-job success than résumés.

Adopting a skills-based approach to talent is more than an innovative hiring strategy; it is a profound investment in your organisation’s most valuable asset which are the people.

Recruiting more talents

It is interesting to know that regardless of a company’s location, the rise of remote work has enabled organisations to hire talent that would not have traditionally been available in their local areas.

Since February 2020 (Post-covid era) till now, the share of cross-metropolitan workers, also known as long-distance or remote workers, rose from 23 percent to more than 31 percent.

The positive implications of remote work include improved worker job matching, the potential for higher wages in a desired location and increased worker flexibility. This is especially relevant for employers looking to engage with and recruit younger generations, such as millennials and Generation Z, who rank a positive work-life balance as their top consideration when choosing an employer.

For employers, it could mean improved recruiting, reduced turnover, more productive workers and the potential to reduce labor costs, even in expensive places, all of particular interest, given that half of organisations report that building a talent pipeline is their top priority in 2025.

Pay equity and pay transparency

Pay equity is about ensuring that people doing the same or similar work are paid the same and that any differences can be explained by legitimate business reasons relating to the work itself or the qualifications and performance of the people doing it.

Globally, pay equity and pay transparency have become prominent issues as gender pay gaps persist. Helping employers understand their compensation and their place in the market is good for everyone because it helps organisations stay competitive, retain their best people and prevent long recruiting processes that end because the money isn’t “right.”

To encourage employers to audit for pay equity and resolve related issues, several states¹⁸ allow employers a period to assess and address pay gaps with reduced or no liability. Employers can benchmark pay for similar organizations in the same industry and geographic location and develop a plan to address pay gaps.

Expanding skills to leverage emerging technologies

Employers say they plan to close generative AI skills gaps through upskilling and reskilling Generative AI and its offshoot technologies are making skills a business priority.

Upskilling and reskilling to support generative AI and its associated activities are new trends in 2025. Leaders are interested in both strategies, on retaining upskilled, reskilled and highly skilled employees and on identifying the skills needed for long-term success with generative AI and the solutions it’s creating.

Among the most common changes to talent strategy by organizations deploying and scaling generative AI are upskilling and reskilling (47%), and executives estimate that 40 percent of their workforces will need to reskill due to the implementation of AI and automation over the next two years.

In 2025, the excitement around generative AI is expected to evolve as the technology becomes more seamlessly integrated into daily workflows.