Key insights from Recbuzz 2025

The recruitment advertising industry is changing at a rapid pace. Maybe at the most accelerated pace in decades. At RecBuzz Vienna 2025, leading experts revealed their insights on how AI, Automation and candidates’ expectations are creating new opportunities.

This comprehensive report highlights the most important trends, challenges, and opportunities emerging in the recruiting advertising industry, as they were presented at Recbuzz.

We are experiencing a rapid change in this industry, which is more accelerated than ever before. Various technological advancements and changes in human behaviour and interaction with technology are contributing to these changes. What was once a relationship-driven process, dominated by intuition and understanding of human behaviour, is now being transformed by big data, algorithms, AI, and predictive analytics.

At Recbuzz 2025, several key trends became apparent:

• AI disruption is here. While it is still not perfect and implementation challenges remain, Artificial Intelligence seems more than just a fading hype.
• Job boards face significant challenges. The time to adapt, innovate, and strategise is now, not next month, not next year or in the future, but now.
• Candidate experience is evolving. With more and more people focusing on social media, consumption switched from text-based content to video content, and the candidates’ expectations are also different.
• Data is the new currency in this industry as well. Collecting and understanding data before and after the application provides complete and deeper insights.
• Monetisation models are shifting. With the amount of data available, powerful new algorithms, and innovative tech, performance-based business models are gaining traction.

Now let’s explore all these areas in depth.

The AI disruption is Recrutiment

Alexander Chukovski’s presentation revealed a paradox: while 92% of companies plan to increase spending in generative AI for recruitment (McKinsey 2025), only 1% of them report achieving mature, measurable ROI from these implementations.

This is mainly caused by various challenges that these companies face with Artificial Intelligence. The first is AI hallucinations and biases. When governmental agencies’ (eg, Austria’s public employment agency) expensive solutions show gender and racial biases in the job recommendations, people react. Poor candidate experience, while optimising the recruitment process is a valid business case for AI, we’ve seen that various interview tools frequently freeze, misunderstand responses, or ask irrelevant questions. Technical limitations, Many companies are stuck in pilot phases, unable to scale AI solutions effectively. 

Despite these challenges, companies in the industry show promising results:

Indeed’s AI matching engine, uses a large number of job attributes for precision matching whilst achieving a high application rate through personalised outreach this results in more data leads to better matches, which attracts more users.

Automated job description tools, generate compliant, unbiased job postings in minutes, including salary predictions and benefit recommendations, reducing the time-to-post from hours to minutes

Alexander Chukovski outlined a five-stage maturity model for AI-powered matching:

1. Basic search – based on keywords and full text search
2. Taxonomies- based on business rules, metadata extraction, synonyms, and taxonomies
3. Query intent understanding – semantic query parsing, semantic knowledge graph, clustering, embeddings
4. User activity-based tuning – signal boosting, active learning, A/B tests
5. Fully automated matching – all previous steps happen without a human overseeing them

Alexander recommended that, going forward, job board owners should:

• Invest in domain-specific taxonomies
• Prioritise candidate feedback loops
• Maintain human oversight to catch biases

The changing role of job boards

By analysing financial indicators, Malcolm Myers identified a captivating story, summarised in a few points:

• Job boards capture just 10% of the recruitment market, estimated to be at $450 billion 
• LinkedIn continues its domination when it comes to passive candidate engagement
• AI-powered products enable direct employer-candidate matching

Through his presentation and also afterwards in various discussions, various job board strategies were debated. Some of these strategies include:

• Vertical specialisation – While generalist job boards are struggling against large players like Indeed and LinkedIn, niche platforms can thrive

• Value-added services – Job boards have the flexibility to explore various other services like employer branding, recruitment marketing, and event hosting. 

• Technology partnerships – job boards should consider the integration with ATS providers and adopt AI matching technologies.

Job boards should also reconsider their monetisation models. Peter Hoogendijk presented three models that job boards can get inspiration from.

• Pay per Performance – including pay per application and pay per click
• Subscription-based access –  for CV databases and employer branding
• Hybrid models – including a base fee plus performance bonus, or tiered visibility packages.

The candidate experience evolution

Jubin Honarfar’s Whatchado demonstrated how recruitment is experiencing a shift towards video content, similar to social media. According to Jubin:

• 82% of recruiters say that content creation is their biggest challenge
• Mobile users spend 110 minutes daily on social platforms
• Video job posts achieve 3-5 times higher engagement than text-based posts

Whatchado takes a different approach, using AI to extract key details from the job descriptions. Then these are automatically transformed into TikTok-style reels and distributed across social media channels with tracking.

A new landscape in the recruiting industry

Chris Forman introduced a few interesting concepts like the “Bang,” which is the Apply event. The “Left of the Bang” includes all the data and processes before the apply event, and the “Right of the Bang” includes data and processes after the apply event occurred. 

According to Chris, a large investment goes to the left of the bang, while the value lies on the right of the bang, where disposition data is.

What the future brings

While listening to various experts in the field, a few possible future trends appear.

According to some, by 2026, we should expect to see AI as colleagues. Artificial intelligence agents should be able to handle the initial screening of candidates, automated bots should be able to schedule meetings, and predictive analytics could be used for retention.

While automation and AI handle the transactional tasks, recruiters will shift focus on improving the employee experience, work on strategic planning, and employer branding.

Conclusion: Navigating the transformation in the recruiting industry

The recruitment industry is transforming. Companies that successfully implement AI thoughtfully, reimagine candidate engagement, monetise through value-added services, and leverage data will thrive. In contrast, those who cling to outdated models risk becoming obsolete.

The accelerated transformation of the recruitment industry might feel overwhelming – new technologies, shifting business models, and evolving candidate expectations can make the future look uncertain. 

But for job board owners, this is not the time for hesitation. It is an opportunity to adapt and thrive.

The key to unlocking future opportunities lies in strategic partnerships. By collaborating with specialized tech providers like Jobiqo, job board owners can:

• Offload technical innovation to experts, freeing up internal resources

• Double down on their core strength – experimentation, content, relationship, and value-added services
• Stay competitive without bearing the full burden of research and development.

This approach creates a powerful synergy – cutting-edge technology meets deep industry expertise.  Modern platforms, data-driven insights, and smart monetisation strategies combine to future-proof businesses in disruptive times.