What's Really Shaping Employer Branding in 2025? 27 Leaders Share Their Candid Insights
Image painted in seconds by AI. Learn about:
AI-powered content for employer branding
Authors:
Want to know what's really happening in employer branding right now?
We asked global EB leaders one direct question: "What's your #1 Employer Branding challenge OR opportunity heading into 2025?" No sugarcoating – just straight talk about what's shaping our industry.
Thank you to all the leaders who shared their candid perspectives. Your honest insights help our entire community navigate what's next.
Let's dive into what's actually keeping EB leaders up at night (and what's getting them excited about 2025)...
Top Challenges:
.png)
Talent Leader #1: Louisa's 2025 challenge:
“A challenge for us continues to be brand penetration in front of our target audiences.
In 2025, we will be focusing much more on digital marketing to ensure that our brand is recognized by the candidates we wish to hire.
Candidate experience also continues to be a priority - making sure our recruiting teams reinforce our employer brand through candidate interactions.”
Connect with Louisa on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #2: Laura's 2025 challenge:
“One of the biggest challenges I see is balancing the need to use AI and advanced tech tools with staying true to the basics. It’s easy to be swept up in the excitement of it all with the promise of efficiencies and scalability. However, the real difficulty lies in not losing sight of the fundamentals: human emotion and genuine connection.
For me, the challenge is to cut through the buzz, resist the fear of being left behind, and focus on building the strong foundation that is so needed. Employer branding is ultimately about people, their stories, and the connections they form with your organization. While AI can enhance our storytelling or personalize messaging, it cannot replicate the authenticity that comes from genuine human interaction.
Going into 2025, the challenge will be ensuring that technology remains a tool, not the driver. Our focus should stay on preserving and amplifying the human touch - crafting narratives that resonate on an emotional level and fostering authentic engagement.
The future of employer branding will belong to organizations that blend cutting-edge technology with timeless principles of empathy, storytelling, and connection. And that’s where I believe the real opportunity lies.”
Connect with Laura on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #3: Dylan's 2025 challenges:
“Our number 1 EB challenge is content. We don’t have a clear strategy for our candidate communications.
We need one so we can make ourselves more relatable to our prospective candidates.”
Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #4: Robin's 2025 challenge:
“I lead a team responsible for showcasing BCG's unique culture and values to prospective employees. Our mission is to communicate BCG's brand effectively at scale through strategic marketing and communications.
My employer branding challenge is maintaining an unwavering focus on quality throughout the talent journey. While many organizations chase volume metrics, we're laser-focused on attracting, engaging, and converting candidates who align with the skill requirements and culture. This means being deliberately authentic in our approach – deeply connecting with top, diverse talent.
By clearly communicating who we are and what to expect, we help candidates self-select. This authenticity-first approach results in higher-quality applications and, ultimately, a better candidate experience. When candidates have a clear understanding of what makes BCG unique, they can make informed decisions about their career, leading to more meaningful connections and successful placements.
We're leveraging advanced analytics and AI to refine our strategies, ensuring our messaging hyper personalized. As we head into 2025, our opportunity lies in further enhancing these technologies to attract and retain top talent by fostering a workplace environment that champions growth and diversity.”
Connect with Robin on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #5: Kristin's 2025 challenge:
“We have seen an increase in overall applications in 2024 due to the labor marketing cooling off and our global EVP launch in Q1 2024 (over a 30% increase in completed applications from 2023, with the number of open jobs staying steady).
Moving into 2025, we will focus on hard-to-fill roles and locations where we struggle to find talent. Our focus is shifting from generating overall awareness to hyper-focusing on our target talent.”
Connect with Kristin on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #6: Søren's 2025 challenge:
“I would say that leveraging Social Media effectively is quite an employer branding challenge.
This, in combination with bringing that employee advocacy and engagement to life and really benefiting from it, is also challenging (even though we have motivated and proud employees).”
Connect with Søren on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #7: Matt's 2025 challenge:
“It’s chaos. Let’s be honest: Employer Branding today feels like a wild juggling act where everyone’s hands are full, but nobody’s quite sure what they’re juggling. There’s the EVP (which some hope will magically solve everything), the “status quo” expectations (clashing with reality), internal and external perceptions, the question of who’s supposed to own what, the ever-pressing need to track ROI, and of course, the budget constraints that make Scrooge look generous. Toss in a bit of internal turf war, sprinkle on some misplaced KPIs, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for existential confusion.
And let’s not forget the ultimate pressure: make all of this drive revenue. No big deal, right? (Cue nervous laughter.)
Here’s the thing, though: despite the chaos, there’s a simple, grounding principle that cuts through it all. Everybody wins if we help job seekers make informed, inspired, and expectations-aligned decisions. Doing that encourages people applying to think more and deeply about what they are applying to and for. Employees stay longer, engagement improves, and yes, the revenue follows. The same logic applies to employee retention and experience. Put the nomenclatures aside. When the goals are clear, the path becomes obvious: define what matters to your audiences and align every decision with that clarity.
Whether the challenges our client-partners face are attraction, engagement, technology, or retention (or all four), it serves us well to remember that every job and career decision for employees and candidates is local (to them), personal, and emotional. To solve any challenge, contextual audience insight, for any context, is the driver of all success.”
Talent Leader #8: Aneta's 2025 challenge:
“Our #1 Employer Branding challenge for 2025 is making sure our Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is consistently understood and applied across all teams globally. With teams operating in different regions and markets, we need to ensure that the EVP resonates everywhere while staying true to our core values.
This challenge is also a great opportunity. By working closely with HR, recruiters, and hiring managers, we can bring the EVP to life in practical ways, such as incorporating it into job descriptions, interview guides, and onboarding materials. For example, during onboarding, we can introduce new hires to our EVP through stories and real-life examples of employees thriving at StoneX.
We’ll also run training sessions and workshops to help global teams fully understand our EVP, values, and key competencies. This could include interactive sessions for hiring managers to ensure the EVP is reflected in interviews or workshops for employees on how they can use the EVP to talk about their own experiences at StoneX.
To make our messaging consistent across regions, we’ll partner with local teams to adapt our EVP for their specific markets. For instance, a team in APAC might focus on career growth opportunities unique to that region, while teams in the US could highlight innovation and entrepreneurial culture.
By doing this, we’ll not only strengthen our global brand but also create a more unified and authentic experience for current employees and future hires. This approach ensures that everyone, no matter where they are, sees StoneX as a place where they can Invest. Progress. Succeed.“
Connect with Aneta on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #9: Celeste's 2025 challenge:
“My biggest challenge this year is, and has been, navigating the difficulty of engaging directly with the true decision-makers driving the employer branding agenda rather than being routed through messengers or intermediaries.
This challenge often arises due to a lack of understanding that employer branding is a strategic business imperative—not just an HR function—and is crucial to aligning with the broader vision and success of the organization. Without access to these key champions, the scope of work and intended outcomes are frequently diluted, resulting in misalignment with business strategies, goals, and success.
This issue spans multinationals, national companies, SMEs, and founder-led organizations, highlighting the need for leadership buy-in and alignment from the outset.”
Connect with Celeste on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #10: Tatiana's 2025 challenge:
“The main challenge is to help people feel safe in the workplace, believe in the future, and understand the meaning of what they do. There are two sides to achieving this:
1. To help employees feel financial stability and
2. Provide mental inspiration.”
Connect with Tatiana on LinkedIn
Opportunities
Talent Leader #11: Yasmine's 2025 opportunity:
“2025 will be a year of making a real impact on business, focusing more on building the talent funnel, winning the talent war through powerful talent attraction tactics, a humanized employer brand, and showing our real value to the business leaders through data analytics.
I'm also excited to explore how I can make use of the AI tools in the Employer Branding world responsibly.
I am also very excited to continue bringing our newly developed EVP and values to life and explain how #ImpactStartsWithUs embeds both in all our comms, showcasing our working culture in the most authentic way!”
Connect with Yasmine on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #12: Fran's 2025 opportunity:
“As a Talent Brand team, we're energized thinking about 2025 as we see an opportunity for our team to reimagine how we inspire, attract, and engage talent at Canva.
Our vision for 2025 is to create a seamless Talent Brand experience across all recruitment touch-points. We want to be dot connectors - creating a cohesive narrative between performance and impact as part of our storytelling.
We're excited to see how we can stretch our impact and continue to bring our Talent Brand magic to new audiences.”
Talent Leader #13: Klyde's 2025 opportunity:
“One of our most significant opportunities in 2025 is attracting more engineering talents to our organization. Focusing on recruitment marketing campaigns in markets where we need key talents works well for us.
I'm excited about more organizational partnerships where we could meet talents face-to-face, outside the standard social media approach.”
Connect with Klyde on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #14: Kara's 2025 opportunity:
"1. Move from the funnel to the loop
Gen Z doesn't make decisions that strictly adhere to a 'linear' framework driven by a singular call to action whereby the candidate is pushed down a funnel. We need to rethink how to attract and engage by pulling candidates into a 'loop' where there are no defined steps, and content is more fluid or organic because there's no end or beginning.
The candidate can flow in different directions. Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Apply must be replaced with content and moments focusing on Inspiration, Exploration, Community, and Loyalty.
2. Go hard on entertaining
Content needs to be entertainment-led. For those who are more daring, the entertainment value needs to be over-indexed to embrace the weird and wonderful. To truly embrace social-first, it's more than just giving your people a voice; it's giving them an entire platform to express themselves how they want."
Talent Leader #15: Quila's 2025 opportunity:
“Our opportunity in 2025 is to broaden our human resources reach and better influence DE&I and employee experience programs.”
Connect with Quila on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #16: Victoria's 2025 opportunity:
“I'm most excited about the appetite for us to create more meaningful, impactful, creative, and fun events for our teams globally. Our priority will be
1) how we can scale the impact internally and build a repeatable approach that works for different event types and
2) how we can easily produce engaging content that we can share throughout the candidate journey - all with cost in mind.
Our best-attended event in 2024 was our version of Hot Ones (check out the YouTube channel if you're not familiar with it already) - "Hot Topics over Hot Wings." We ordered Hot Wings from one of our customers and served them increasingly hotter and spicier sauces (including Da Bomb Insanity!).
We interviewed three of our top leaders about various 'Hot Topics' while they were eating the ridiculously Hot Wings. Everyone loved it, so we're focused on what a 2025 calendar of events like this looks like and how we scale them effectively internally, globally, and externally, with the added challenge that we're still in stealth mode, too.”
Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #17: Alex's 2025 opportunity:
“Along with the rest of us, I think the challenges and opportunities that will come with the AI revolution are at the top of my mind. It's sure to totally change the game for employer branding. Imagine being able to tailor every candidate's experience, from the first job posting to their first day.
AI can help us keep our employees engaged, too. By analyzing employee data, we can spot potential issues before they become problems. We can use AI to create personalized development plans and offer targeted training.
But let's be real: AI's not a magic wand. We still need the human touch. We need to make sure we're using AI ethically and responsibly. But if we do it right, AI can help us build a killer employer brand that attracts and retains top talent.”
Talent Leader #18: Gergana's 2025 opportunity:
“Employer branding professionals have faced many challenges in 2023 and 2024 due to broader circumstances. This challenge could also be an opportunity.
This is an opportunity to redefine the role of employer branding in business success and highlight its importance. Things change, and we need to be agile.
I am mostly excited about implementing more social media in my role at Capita and adopting an approach where employees are at the heart of the strategy.
Since we're living in an AI-driven world now, this would also impact future initiatives.”
Connect with Gergana on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #19: Chris' 2025 opportunity:
“In my opinion, the big opportunity focus in employer branding for 2025 is a long-term brand strategy that builds awareness and improves talent perception.
It should involve conducting internal research to understand the company's main value propositions and deep external research that digs deep to understand the needs of the talent market. By linking these together, a comprehensive long-term brand strategy can be developed, encompassing awareness and perception building.
Recruitment marketing remains crucial for filling roles, but it should be integrated into the long-term brand strategy. Close alignment with the corporate communications team to ensure audiences are defined, and content output is on the same page.
For lesser-known companies or those with misconceptions, addressing these issues is vital to help recruiters effectively sell the company. I highly recommend reading Les Binet’s The Long and the Short of It for a deeper look at balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation.
Another opportunity that will be a focus for 2025 lies in creating a system or using a tool to distribute on-brand assets for recruiters quickly so they can engage with potential candidates. This will most likely leverage AI to help quickly create on-brand assets that resonate without relying on design support.
The big opportunity for employer branding in 2025 is a long-term brand strategy that builds awareness, improves perception, and integrates recruitment marketing under a cohesive umbrella campaign. Addressing misconceptions and developing a system for quickly distributing on-brand assets for recruiters will also be a big opportunity to enhance employer branding efforts.”
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #20: Craig's 2025 opportunity:
“As we approach 2025, one of the most significant opportunities I see in employer branding lies in bridging the gap between traditional recruitment marketing and proven B2C and B2B marketing strategies. Having spent most of my career in B2B digital marketing, I've seen firsthand how techniques that drive customer engagement can be tremendously effective in employer branding, yet they're often overlooked.
One of the areas I continue to focus on is leveraging inbound recruitment marketing strategies to attract top talent. This typically involves a content strategy that resonates with potential candidates, optimizing our digital presence, and nurturing candidates through personalized and meaningful interactions – much like how we would engage prospects in the B2B space.
Despite the technological advancements in AI, automation, and data analytics, we must remember that we are in the business of people.
Building and maintaining authentic, genuine, and human-driven relationships is not just crucial; it's the heart of what we do. It's not enough to rely solely on technology to understand people; we must engage in real conversations, look beyond paper resumes, and foster connections that reflect our commitment to individuals as unique contributors.
In a world saturated with automated processes and AI-driven interactions, putting humans at the forefront is not just a strategy; it's a testament to the value we place on each individual in our industry.”
Connect with Craig on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #21: Yves' 2025 opportunity:
“Looking ahead to 2025, I believe the biggest opportunity for employers is to elevate their employer branding to the next level by adopting a data-driven approach.
This means leveraging insights not just to craft compelling narratives but also to address root causes affecting employer brand perception, from recruitment processes to employee experience.
All of this should be based on human drivers that support the employer brand. The shift toward data-driven employer branding is not just an operational improvement; it’s a strategic necessity in today’s competitive talent landscape.
I’m excited to see how organizations will embrace this shift and build truly differentiated brands in the year ahead.”
Talent Leader #22: Stanimira's 2025 opportunity:
“For many of us, 2024 has shown how quickly the world of Employer Branding can evolve, with AI advancements and shifting employee expectations reshaping the way we work. One thing is clear: the future of Employer Branding depends on the next generation of talent.
As we step into 2025, it’s crucial to focus on empowering new leaders in this field. Since there’s still no formal education for Employer Branding, we need to embrace hands-on learning, mentorship, and agile approaches to upskilling. For me, it’s about helping professionals adapt quickly, learn on the go, and master areas like AI integration and data-driven storytelling while staying grounded in the bigger picture of creating meaningful workplaces.
At the same time, building strong communities within the industry is more important than ever. By sharing knowledge and supporting each other, we can tackle challenges together, spark innovation, and keep the momentum going.
In 2025, I will focus on turning today’s changes into opportunities—helping Employer Branding evolve into a strategic force that truly shapes the future of work.”
Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #23: Anna-Lena's 2025 opportunity:
“The future of Employer Branding lies in embracing video content, especially on LinkedIn, as it continues to dominate engagement across all social media platforms.
To stand out, organizations should empower corporate influencers to share authentic, relatable, and empathetic stories that connect with audiences on a personal, eye-to-eye level.”
Connect with Anna-Lena on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #24: Aimee's 2025 opportunity:
“I think the huge opportunity in 2025 is leveraging AI to transform our talent attraction and engagement strategies.
AI would enable us to craft tailored job ads, optimize media spending in real time, and deliver seamless candidate experiences.
However, the challenge lies in implementing these technologies, requiring investment, stakeholder buy-in, and upskilling our teams to maximize its potential.”
Connect with Aimee on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #25: Olajumoke's 2025 opportunity:
“Employees prioritizing their mental well-being and having a great employer brand story, especially on social media, no longer cuts it. There is a high demand for authenticity and genuine engagement from companies.
In 2025, the opportunity lies in creating a truly transparent workplace culture where employees feel valued and heard.
This means actively demonstrating a commitment to mental health support, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and fostering an environment that allows for open dialogue and feedback.”
Connect with Olajumoke on LinkedIn
.png)
Talent Leader #26: Isabel's 2025 opportunity:
“I am looking forward to 2025. The end of 2024 has given me a glimpse of what lies ahead and what will be crucial for the future.
Community building remains a key focus for me. I truly believe that creating spaces for people to share experiences and knowledge is vital, both professionally and personally. This not only allows individuals to network with like-minded people and contribute to their passions, but it also raises awareness on various important topics.
For me, community building and employer branding are only possible with collaboration.
During onboarding sessions, I often mention that my work can be very solitary or highly collaborative, and I prefer it to be collaborative. I strive to collaborate as much as possible within the company, with our employees (e.g., through stories, social media posts, etc.), and externally with partners, meetups, and event sponsorships.
Another significant goal for me in 2025 is integrating more technology into my work, especially AI. I plan to test new platforms and tools throughout the year. Technology is here to stay; we can see and hear that at every event or conference, and I am eager to explore how I can leverage it further.”
Connect with Isabel on LinkedIn
Talent Leader #27: Jay's 2025 opportunity:
“I took some time to reflect on 2024: Building Employer Brands for the Future. “Why do we keep having to refresh our employer brand? It’s expensive!”
I hear this a lot. After 25 years of working with some of the world’s most valuable brands, I’ve come to realize that employer branding needs a shift in thinking. We need to focus on creating brands that don’t just last but also have room to grow.
Now, more than ever, companies need employer brands that are future-proof—brands that go beyond simply reflecting the present and tap into what’s coming next. A great employer brand should not only serve as a solid foundation but also help nurture a high-performance culture that can carry an organization toward its future goals. To make this happen, it’s essential to have clear strategies, strong coaching, and development programs that help shape the culture and guide it toward its full potential.
In 2025, the opportunity I’m excited for is to relaunch Flint & Steel Inc., the employer brand and performance culture agency I founded in 2000. I’ve gathered an incredible team of experts in psychometrics, candidate research, coaching, experiential training, branding, strategy, team-building and technology to take this whole employer branding thing to the next level.
This relaunch will bring together advanced psychometric assessments, cutting-edge candidate research, and The Martec’s AI-powered tools for employee advocacy to create employer brands that aren’t just aspirational but also primed for growth.
Our mission is to help organizations build strong employer brands and develop the high-performance cultures that are essential for long-term success. By aligning brand strategies with business objectives and equipping our clients with the best tools and processes available, we’re changing the way companies attract, select, develop, and retain top talent.
I’m excited to partner with clients in 2025, helping them set big goals, achieve even bigger results, and build employer brands and performance cultures that will stand the test of time and inspire us all.”
Want to see how this compares to the start of the year? Read what 28 Talent Market Leaders Revealed as Their Top Focuses For 2024
