HR Trends 2025
What will be the big 2025 HR trends? How will they affect employees and HR teams? Let’s take a look at the trends for the upcoming year and what they could mean for your business (and get a sneak peek at our upcoming Gen Z survey results too!)…
AI
Generative AI has made its way into almost every area of our lives, and HR tech is no exception. It can help with almost every HR function, from recruitment to exit interviews. It can schedule interviews, feedback on candidates, even conduct the interview itself. And that’s just the recruitment side of what AI can do.
AI can also provide talent management and people analytics insights that can help organizations form their HR strategies to ensure they get the most from their employees and can fulfil employee expectations. These actionable insights provide keys to what’s really going on inside your business to ensure that you adhere to the best practices for your employees and that when you launch a new HR initiative, it’s what your team want from you.
Generative AI tools open up HR professionals’ time so that they can use it supporting their colleagues and providing more human interactions through personalised development and employee engagement measures.
Personalisation
AI adoption streamlining tasks frees up human resources’ time to spend on creating more human interactions instead. The HR department gets more time to understand what employees really need, supporting them with their professional development and improving employee wellbeing to create high-performance teams.
Technology also makes it easier to find the right training method for an employee, and to support them with that training, for instance with Sanctus Mentoring‘s unique mentor matching algorithm (more on mentoring below).
Return to office
Many companies have been forcing their employees back to the office either some or part of the time. KPMG research from 2024 found that 83% of CEOs in the UK expect to see a full return to office within 3 years. But People Management data found that 69% of employees would look for a new job if they were told to spend more time in the office. So businesses that force employees to return to the office may risk losing their top performers and be forced to replace them from a smaller talent pool – and therefore not getting the best fit for those roles.
A more balanced approach, that gives employees the freedom they crave and businesses the face time they want, would be hybrid work. Hybrid work models give employees the freedom to work in their own space – along with a better work/life balance – while giving managers the piece of mind that work is being done and the collaborative environment that often gets lost when people work from home (although the right HR tech and company culture can combat this).
The rise of Gen Z
While not every Gen Zer is old enough to enter the workforce yet, their dominance in the workplace will continue to grow – changing corporate culture one business at a time.
They’re the first generation of digital natives, growing up with technological advancement after technological advancement. When you consider how different the world was in 1997, when the first Gen Zers were born, it’s mind boggling.
Understanding how Gen Z think will be key for businesses that want to succeed and continue to grow.
To do this, companies will need to find ways to communicate their values to show they’re in line with Gen Z’s, as well as offer ways to support them such as through coaching and mentoring (we’ll cover why these matter down below).
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA)
Which direction will DEIA in corporate culture go? With recent rollbacks in DEIA across the political and business sectors, but some companies like Apple and CostCo reiterating their importance, it’s too soon to tell how this will impact organization’s bottom lines, political climates, and employees’ wellbeing.
What we do know is that inclusion is still a top issue for Gen Z, so companies rolling this back may find that they lose out on the knowledge and insights of the next generation of workers.
In our recent survey, 16.5% of Gen Z said that inclusion was their most important company value when applying for a role. It was only 1% behind honesty and integrity. 19% of female employees put it as their most important value.
Purpose-led work
Almost a quarter of Gen Z survey respondents said that they wanted to make a difference in the world. It was the second most important element of work after pay. This reinforces recent discussions we’ve seen around purpose congruence and how to align employee purpose with company purpose.
Emerging trends suggest that employees don’t just want a job anymore; they want to feel like they’re making a difference in the world. To tap into this, businesses need to double down on their values and morals, finding ways to differentiate themselves from competitors. These differences in values will help attract the right people for the culture and the candidates most likely to succeed.
Coaching and mentoring for learning and development
Our upcoming survey showed that, by far, the most popular way to learn for Gen Z – soon to be the biggest generation in the workforce – were mentoring and coaching. They want tailored, one-to-one training so that they can continue to learn and grow in their careers – even if they don’t want to follow a traditional career path.
Following a different path
Our upcoming survey also showed that many Gen Zers don’t want to follow traditional career paths. Just 6% voted role seniority as a sign of workplace success, while 27% put career progression as the thing that matters the least to them in the workplace.
They may not be interested in career progression, but they do want to keep learning – continuous learning was voted the most important company value for 19.5% of Gen Z. This shows that they understand knowledge is important, but work/life balance is far more important to them than traditional workplace roles.
They’ve seen the mistakes of millennials, who were promised that if they worked hard they could earn more money and achieve their goals, but found the goalposts moving increasingly out of their reach. So Gen Z skipped bothering to aim for that and instead value their lives outside of work far more.
Conclusion
2025 is likely to be a year of upheaval in the HR landscape and beyond. None of us know which direction things will go in, but these 2025 HR trends are likely to have significant impacts on how companies operate, the types of candidates they attract, and the external climate businesses operates in.
Interested in the rest of our Gen Z survey results? Discover how to attract, retain, and train Gen Z in our whitepaper coming soon!