Talent Hacking is the ability of a recruiter to detect and convince great and talented recruits to work for a certain company. If Talent Hacking has evolved with technology and new management methods in the last decades, it isn’t done yet. In 2025, the change will be even more flagrant than in 2015. But what can we expect?

New Managers, New Management

The starting point is that recruitment will change, simply because managers won’t be the same. Indeed, it will be the time of late Generation X and early Generation Y to take control of companies… almost. Because the notion of hierarchy will most certainly evolve. Their management will change: they’ll indeed adopt a new style not entirely putting them in charge.

Indeed, as pointed out in our article about Generation Y, Digital Natives are extremely different from their X generation parents. They are more flexible and open-minded regarding work environment. In 2025, Generation Y will represent 75% of the workforce in developed countries like France. And those working for them will be non other than Generation Z products, who are have a different conception too of career advancement and work relations. This is why collaborators will be more empowered. The hierarchy will be softer and less static. Job relations will be more transversal, and no longer as up down as it used to be.

The job description of the manager will therefore also evolve. It will shift from the “know it all” transmitting manager to the enabler one. He/She’ll be there not much to monitor your work and deliver sacred wisdom but instead to make sure the collaborator is unleashing his/her true potential. The job will embrace a more open, lighter management style. Fostering the emergence of talents will become priority n°1.

This new vision of talent and its management will impact recruitment itself

Recruiters will be more taking into account soft skills, potential, and talent. Of course, experience and hard skills won’t be abandoned as they are central too, yet a certain emphasis will also be put on those new elements ensuring the ability to learn, adapt and advance.

Recruitment will no longer mostly be based on skills and experience. Personality, Adaptability to the Company’s culture and taste for “Experimentation” will be screened. This trend is already existing today yet only in certain sectors. In 2025 it may be almost generalised. Affinities will matter more, and this is why the French startup Monkey Tie is betting on this trend.

Except for positions required a strong expertise and hard skills, like in the engineering or medical sectors, what will matter the most are motivation and potential. Making mistakes will be understood as part of the formation. The logic is the following one: as long as the learning curve is excellent, everything is fine. It will be of common agreement that mistakes will enable the unleashing of the recruit’s potential.

Networking will become even more intensive. The new generations having more power in their relation with superiors and demanding more, the recommendations between peers will increase. This is the logic of the startup Refer me please. HR people will therefore need to adjust to that. The job won’t only be to recruit outside a firm, to find talent, but also to detect talents within the firm who unlocked their potential and want to advance professionally. More trust, more transparency.

Recruitment will also follow the trends of the new talents preferences. Generations Y and Z tend to flee life jobs and prefer more flexibility, mobility through the applications to different missions. Firms will therefore have to understand this more mobile logic: letting recruits leave the company to join a competitor and come back several times, or even to evolute in another sector. Companies will need to drop the patriarcal view of human resources.

Tech will reshape Recruitment

In The Future of Recruiting and Hiring Technology – Will recruiting and hiring ever not need humans? Adam Vaccaro gives a pretty interesting view on how Technology in the future will or at least should look like.

First of all, technology will adjust to the needs of the industry, and assist the recruiters even more. With the new Generations Y and Z, the professional environment will evolve. It will be more mobile, more flexible and everything will go faster.

We already alluded for instance to Big Data and digital hacking in a previous article, yet other forms of assistance are also catching the eye of recruiters. And most of them are looking for humanised technology not doing the entire job but instead helping them do theirs.

Recruiters have a certain view of how recruitment will look like with technology in a few years. They want a human touch. Certain industries use the screening of resumes method which is reacting to buzzwords regarding employment and education information to select candidates: this is quite efficient yet highly criticised for having an imperfect logic. Lou Adler CEO of the Adler Group, says a lot of recruiting technology such as this one is “still about weeding out the weak rather than finding the best.”

More and more, recruiters are trying to promote another type of recruiting technology: the one valorising talents, not chopping the weakest off. Recruiting technology should not judge itself candidates, but help the recruiter assess the skills, abilities etc. This is what will happen in 2025 and even from now on. A “smartification of the recruiting process” according to Adam Vaccaro.

Sharlyn Lauby, President ITM Group is of the same opinion. Technology will help recruiters gain time and (therefore) to their job better. This is actually the logic of our product at InterviewApp. We’re offering a pre recorded video interview solution in order to assist them in their recruiting activities (immediate access to soft skills, gain of time).

Conclusion

Hacking talent is therefore going to be different in 2025. Both technology, generational mindsets and conceptions of work will evolve and leave the recruiters no other choice but to adjust. Yet it would seem it is for the best! Talent will be redefined and the approach to it will be more human.