Annual report · 2025

Go beyond the pipeline.
Boost your quality of hire.

For years, TA leaders have wondered if social media actually attracts higher-quality candidates. This report answers it.

Based on 80+ pages of industry-first research and data from thousands of job campaigns, Adway's 2025 Annual Report uncovers how AI-powered social recruiting is delivering better candidates, faster.

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Inside the report

Download your copy and discover

  • The data proving social media's impact on application quality and hiring speed
  • Why manual targeting is dead — and what's replacing it
  • How social recruiting engages untapped talent pools before competitors do
  • What programmatic advertising looks like in a recruitment context
  • Where AI is reshaping how companies target talent on social platforms
  • Quality-of-hire benchmarks from thousands of real job campaigns

The report at a glance

Five trends shaping social recruiting in 2025

Trend 01

Social media's role in recruitment — an academic perspective

With insights from cutting-edge research at LMU Munich and real data from thousands of social recruiting campaigns, the report reveals how programmatic advertising and AI are reshaping the way companies target untapped talent on social media.

Trend 02

Quality of hire is the new conversion rate

Volume metrics — applications, clicks, impressions — tell you who showed up. Quality metrics tell you who you should hire. The report unpacks how the best TA teams have moved past vanity numbers and connected campaign-level data to downstream hiring outcomes.

Trend 03

Manual targeting is dead

Behavioural targeting, AI-driven audience modelling, and programmatic delivery now outperform manual recruiter sourcing on both quality and cost. The report quantifies the gap with campaign data and explains what replaces the legacy workflow.

Trend 04

Always-on beats burst campaigning

Companies running continuous employer-brand activation see compounding pool growth — and dramatically lower cost-per-hire when they open a role. The report shows the math behind the always-on model and the operating cadence that makes it work.

Trend 05

Untapped talent is the real prize

The candidates worth hiring are rarely the ones actively job-hunting. Social platforms reach the 90 % who aren't on job boards — and the report shows how to convert that reach into pre-engaged, qualified pipeline before competitors catch on.

Backed by research

80+

pages of industry-first research and analysis

1000s

of job campaigns analysed across markets and verticals

LMU

Munich research collaboration on AI in recruitment marketing

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80+ pages of research, real campaign data, and the playbook for AI-powered social recruiting in 2025. Free, straight to your inbox.

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