If you read our first post in this series on the big recruitment marketing shifts of 2025, this is the follow-on.
This one is more of a round-up. Everything we published in 2025, organised by what mattered, plus some bets we are making for 2026.
Start here if you only read three posts:
Recruitment marketing got more honest in 2025. Teams stopped pretending that volume equals value.
Job boards still optimise for clicks and applications. But the hiring teams we work with are paid to fill roles, not to sift CVs.
The market data is lining up with what most TA teams already feel. CareerBuilder + Monster, two of the biggest legacy job board brands, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2025.
In the UK, hiring confidence stayed fragile. Hays issued a profit warning in June 2025, pointing to the same uncertainty buyers feel in day-to-day hiring decisions.
And Reed’s own data, shared with LBC, showed new job listings down 23% across March 2025 versus March 2024.
That backdrop matters because it pushes recruitment marketing towards performance. Outcome metrics, channel mix, and conversion.
If you want the full breakdown of why job boards are falling behind, and what a modern alternative looks like, start with our cornerstone page comparing job boards with Gaia.
Then work through these posts:
We wrote a lot about one specific pain in 2025.
You can hit 100 CVs and still not have a shortlist.
That is rarely a budget problem. It is usually a targeting problem, a channel mix problem, or a message problem.
This is where social media recruitment becomes practical. It is not about posting jobs on LinkedIn and hoping. Hiring teams need to run social media advertising that reaches passive candidates, then use retargeting to bring them back when they are ready.
If you missed these, they are a good sequence to read in order:
This is also where we see AI help in a very real way. With Gaia campaigns, AI is used to optimise targeting, shift budget towards the best-performing audiences and channels, and reduce wasted spend on low-quality clicks.
If you want a proof-heavy example of quality at scale, take a look at how Mitie filled 250 secure-justice roles while hitting MoJ diversity targets.
A lot of recruitment marketing waste happens after the click.
You can have strong creative, good targeting, and still lose candidates to clunky apply pages, slow load times, or long forms.
We kept coming back to conversion in 2025 because it is one of the fastest ways to improve apply-to-hire without spending more.
These three posts cover the funnel leaks we see most often:
If you are trying to improve conversion quickly, this is exactly what GaiaPages is built for: mobile-first landing pages with short apply journeys.
Employer brand moved on in 2025. When it is paired with targeting and retargeting, it stops being a brand-only activity and becomes a performance lever.
Better click-to-apply. Better shortlist rates. Lower cost per qualified candidate.
These posts capture what changed:
And if you want a real example of social media recruitment working at scale, Babcock’s case study is a strong read. It is social-first, and it shows what happens when you combine brand storytelling with AI-led optimisation.
Most teams did not get more headcount in 2025.
They got more roles, more scrutiny on spend, and more pressure to show results.
So we wrote about the operating model shift: how recruitment marketing needs to run like a system, not a one-off project.
If you are building a repeatable way to launch campaigns, report performance, and learn what works, start here:
This is also where integrations stop being a “nice to have”. If your ATS is disconnected, you lose time and you lose signal. Gaia is built to work with your ATS without dev time.
Two things tightened in 2025.
That is why we wrote about AI and privacy in practical terms. AI is valuable when it removes manual campaign management and improves outcomes. Privacy changes matter because they force better first-party strategy.
These three posts cover the core shifts:
This is the direction we expect recruitment marketing to keep moving in 2026. More social media advertising, more programmatic advertising that is optimised for downstream outcomes, and less time spent in spreadsheets.
When budgets tighten, proof matters.
These posts are a mix of external validation (Fosway and awards), proof of what we shipped (GaiaComplete), and one market lens on what’s changing (the WEF Future of Work report).
If you want the product view of what GaiaComplete includes, beyond the press release, click here.
We also went deep on a sector where recruitment marketing is not optional.
Regulated hiring forces clarity. On compliance, on conversion, and on what “good” looks like in hard locations.
These two posts show how we think about moving from macro trends to a sector playbook:
If 2025 taught us anything, it is that recruitment marketing works when it is treated like performance marketing.
If you want to talk through what this looks like for your roles, book a demo here: https://www.iamgaia.com/book-a-demo
If you are sharing this with a client or agency partner, start with the three links at the top. They cover the market shift, the job board comparison, and the operating model.
Recruitment marketing is how you attract and convert candidates using paid media, content, and landing pages, across channels like social, search, and programmatic.
Because most candidates are not actively searching job boards every day. Social media advertising helps you reach passive talent, then retarget them until they are ready to apply.
It is automated buying and optimisation of job ads across digital channels. Done well, it uses data and AI to shift budget towards what is delivering qualified candidates and hires, not just clicks.