Cibyl shares three key themes set to dominate early careers in 2025: candidate use of AI, early careers analytics, and skills-based hiring.
When ISE asked the Cibyl team to provide our predictions for 2025, we had so much to say it was difficult to narrow the themes down.
The team at Cibyl spend all of their time researching school and university students, consulting with employers on their early careers strategies, and providing HEIs with reports on student employability.
Sitting at this intersection between students, education providers, and employers means that we can comment on the trends we see in all of those areas. Here are our top three for 2025.
1. Candidate use of AI will evolve
In 2024 we saw experimentation: candidates were trying out AI as an assistive tool, to speed up their research and – yes – to write parts of their applications.
In 2024, we found 37% of university students said they would not use AI in the recruitment process.
In 2025 we expect more candidates to use AI, and we expect them to refine their use of AI in the recruitment process.
As students become more familiar with the use of AI tools, and as the tools themselves improve, we expect that AI assistance will be harder to detect.
Real-time AI usage will make interviews more vulnerable to AI assistance: the recent OpenAI releases of advanced voice models, for example, mean candidates can go from input to output even faster, getting answers to an interviewer’s questions almost instantly.
At Cibyl we’ve added questions on AI use at specific stages of the assessment process to our 2025 Graduate Study, to investigate which assessment methods are most – and least – likely to be affected by the rise in candidates’ use of AI.
2. The rise of early careers analytics
Early careers teams are wrangling with their data, trying to get to a place where they have ‘always-live’ insights for their candidate pipelines, and the ability to make connections between attraction sources, assessment scores, and performance in role.
In 2024, many early careers teams were at the lower end of the ‘analytics maturity’ scale: experimenting with tools, conducting data audits to identify and address gaps, and beginning to make system changes that will set them up to make the most of their data in the future.
In 2025 we predict that many early careers teams will begin to climb the ladder of analytics maturity. This means connecting enough candidate data to master ‘descriptive analytics’ (describing what’s happening throughout the candidate pipeline) and some will move on to ‘diagnostic analytics’; using automation and insights tools to diagnose problems with the early careers process, and fix those issues mid-campaign.
At GTI we’re working on analytics solutions and consultative support to help early careers teams make the most of their data and fix these issues.
3. Skills-based hiring leads to skills-based data and services
In 2024 we saw more employers make moves towards skills-based hiring.
We predict that this trend will continue into 2025, and that early careers teams will need new sets of tools to transition to true skills-based hiring.
At GTI we have developed tools to help early careers teams, HEIs, and candidates to make the most of this shift to a skills focus in early careers. Using our own data, we’ve built an early careers skills taxonomy and used it to power solutions like a candidate skills-jobs matching tool.
On the Cibyl research front, we’ve added more skills questions to our graduate and schools studies to help employers understand and build attraction strategies for students with specific skillsets.
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