Tie up your year and plan for 2025 Recruitment Needs

Sponsored post by McLaren Recruitment

The holidays are rapidly approaching and 2025 is only a calendar page turn away. It’s a great time to give yourself and your team a break, but also to do some planning for next year, especially if you are planning for new team members in the new year. Here’s what you need to know going into 2025.

End of the year timeframes

Now is a good time to think ahead to potential hiring needs. Studies have shown that a whopping 44% - 57% of people think about quitting their job while enjoying a holiday break. There’s nothing like spending time away from their workplace to inspire people to look for greener pastures.

Start thinking about your recruitment needs for 2025 now. If you know you’ll likely be hiring early in the new year, consider advertising over the holiday break. It might mean a longer advertising period than you would normally use, but it can be the perfect time because many people have more time on their hands over the holidays to peruse job boards, daydream about their next opportunity and put together a compelling application.

Whether you use a recruitment agency or do things in-house, if you’re going to advertise over the holidays give yourself enough time to get your advertising and processes in place before the typical office holiday closedown period. Many online job boards will only let you advertise for a maximum of 30 days, which is something to keep in mind if you plan on running a longer advertising campaign.

A thorough recruitment process can take up to three weeks from the role closing date to the offer stage, and then you have to factor in a notice period, which is typically four weeks,  but potentially months for more senior candidates. Get a head start on hiring for 2025 and don’t wait until it’s too late!

The job market

For much of this year, we’ve seen a marked uptick in application numbers coming through for our listed vacancies. This is particularly true for roles that can be done remotely and admin-based positions, but overall we’re seeing higher application numbers across the board at all levels and for all role types. While having lots of potential candidates to choose from is a good problem to have, from a brand management perspective you must engage with your applicants and manage your recruitment processes fairly and respectfully. 

It’s been a tough market for many job seekers, and emotions are understandably running high as financial pressures compound. It was only a few years ago when we were experiencing a candidate-short market and no doubt we’ll find ourselves there again eventually. People might not remember the specifics of the job they applied for, but they do remember how an organisation made them feel. With the technology available these days, there’s no excuse for ghosting applicants or not keeping track and providing outcomes to those who have taken the time to apply.

Flexibility and working from home

There’s been a lot of talk towards the end of 2024 around bringing staff back into the office and either reducing or doing away with working from home. It can be a contentious topic – people who have enjoyed the flexibility and reduced cost of not having to commute five days a week are very reluctant to give that up, and suburban cafes and businesses are thriving. However, those operating in the CBD are crying out for organisations to bring their employee’s spending power back to the central city, particularly in Wellington.

From a candidate's perspective, having flexibility with hours or the option to work from home is still very important, especially as the increased cost of living continues to bite. It’s one of the most common questions we get asked by prospective applicants when they’re inquiring about or being screened for job opportunities. Organisations that don’t offer this kind of flexibility have been missing out on some great talent who are firm on wanting to have more control over where they work.

The desire for hybrid or remote roles won’t be going anywhere, but how organisations manage this moving forward will be interesting. Either way, if you’re hiring it’s important to be clear right from the get-go about your expectations both within your advertising and throughout your interviewing process so that you don’t waste time – the applicant’s or your own!

We appreciate budgets are tight all round, so if the salary range you can offer is at the lower end of market expectations, we highly recommend offering flexibility and hybrid working as a way to balance things out. Commuting and child-care costs are on the rise so any way that employers can support their employees to help keep expenses down is highly valued and very attractive to job seekers. Need to find out how your salary bands compare to market expectations? You can find salary guides that relate to specific industries and role types online. Or you can engage with a provider (like us!) who will provide job-sizing advice about remuneration.

People want stability

For many 2024 has felt like the year of redundancies, with the public sector in particular facing lots of uncertainty.  As a result, we’ve seen an increased number of people looking for job stability. The contracting space, especially in Wellington, has taken a pretty big hit this year as government agencies tighten their belts. These cuts are set to continue into 2025, but hopefully won’t be as impactful to the job market and local economy as they have been in 2024.

If you’re trying to headhunt or attract top talent, the desire for job security is something to keep in mind. Those already in permanent work may be reluctant to leave if they’re concerned about the future viability of a role or organisation. Make sure you’re clear in your candidate attraction strategy about what information you communicate in your advertising and interviewing processes.

AI and the Workplace

The buzz around AI and how it will impact not only hiring, but also how we work may have died down a little, but it’s still going to be a factor in the modern workplace for 2025. The use of AI can be a great tool when it comes to helping workshop ideas or content creation, but we certainly caution against relying on AI tools completely. The human touch is still important and it can be detrimental to an organisational brand if a reliance on AI is too obvious to the consumer. The same goes for using AI-driven recruitment or CRM software to process and filter job applications – it’s still really vital to have a real person reviewing applications as the software doesn’t always get things right when reading CVs and you don’t want to miss out on great applicants due to an algorithm.  

Job seekers are using AI to assist with things like writing cover letters which again is a useful tool, but experienced recruiters are becoming pretty adept at being able to spot when a candidate has relied completely on AI rather than using it as a building block. 

What’s to come

As much as we’d love to have a crystal ball, the pandemic and this year’s wide-ranging government job cuts showed us that things can change quickly when it comes to the job market. While no one can really predict what the job market will truly look like in 2025, MBIE data shows we’ll be seeing 47,000 more people entering the workforce on average each year to 2026 and there’s some optimism around Aotearoa’s economic outlook – particularly for the regions. Unfortunately, it appears Wellington is still in for a bit of a rough ride in 2025 as it’s expected that there will be more cuts coming to the public sector, which in turn has a knock-on effect for local businesses whose customer base is impacted. However, if you’re hiring in Wellington, that means you’ll potentially have a healthy pool of talent to consider.

If you’d like some support during your recruitment, the team at McLaren Recruitment are ready to assist and specialise in helping organisations in the not-for-profit sector.