Hiring Trends 2025

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Watch and share this exploration of 2025 employment and hiring trends from PrideStaff. Learn from a carefully curated panel of workforce experts as they dig into the employment challenges and opportunities shaping 2025.

Zeroing in on the California market while offering universal insights, all employers can and will benefit from this informative roundtable discussion.

  • Explore candidate experience best practices
  • Discover effective employee engagement strategies
  • Get proven retention tips
  • Find out why leadership development reskilling matters

California Hiring 2025: Will It Be a Golden Year for Golden State Employers?

Don’t have an hour to watch the roundtable? We’ve got you covered. PrideStaff has summarized the 10 biggest hiring trends and employment lessons of the event. They’re all yours for the learning and employing. Read more »

The Panel

Stephen Avila
Plant Manager, Trillium Flow Technologies

Eric Gregg
Founder + CXS, ClearlyRated

Pankaj Jindal
Co-Founder, Sense

Leslie Vickrey
CEO, ClearEdge

10 Hiring Trends for California: Engagement Lessons, Workforce Building, and Retention Tips

California is a complicated conundrum for employers and workers alike.”Who would want to live and work anywhere else? It’s California!” That is one side of the employment coin. California is a remarkable state boasting the 5th largest economy in the world, brimming with a population of skilled and hardworking people. And it sits at the beating heart of innovation, creativity, and an exquisitely diverse and inspiring landscape.

On the other side of the coin, California employers and workers have legitimate and unique hurdles to clear: “How do we attract and keep talent in this intricate, high-cost market?” California often faces the full force of the country’s economic challenges because of its size and reach, because of its vast entrepreneurial community of risk takers, and because of its complex, rapidly changing employment regulations.

Hiring Trends & Employment Answers

PrideStaff’s team of NorCal workforce strategists (aka huge fans of Golden State employment and employers) created an event focused on the sunnier, shinnier side of that coin. Titled California Hiring Trends 2025: Will It Be a Golden Year for Golden State Employers?, our goal was to give employers a chance to hear from local NorCal business leaders, workforce strategists, and innovators. We wanted to explore what is working when it comes to hiring trends, employee engagement strategies,employee retention, reskilling, and growing a California-based workforce.

With panelists Stephen Avila, Plant Manager at Trillium Flow Technologies in Fresno, and Pankaj Jindal, Co-Founder of Sense in San Francisco, the event welcomed two Californians who offered a bounty of locally informed workforce lessons and hiring trends insight.

We were also thrilled to welcome Eric Gregg, Founder + CXS, of ClearlyRated whose understanding of how various workforce dynamics and employment strategies shape business success is unrivaled. Our moderator, Leslie Vickrey, CEO and founder of ClearEdge, brought her more than two decades of talent industry experience to the conversation helping us get to the points that matter most to California employers, 10 of which we have summarized for you here.

Top 10 Lessons for California Employers

While we feel certain that more than 30 lessons and hiring trends were doled out over the course of the one-hour webinar, we are going to focus in on the 10 where our panel and audience spent the most time. As you will read, candidate recruiting, retention, and boosting employee productivity were all high-interest topics during the discussion. From our panelists’ perspectives, these challenges are all opportunities. As one panelist reminded the planning team, California employers can’t fix inflation or change employment regulations. They can, however, take new approaches to hiring and retention. They can experiment with tools and processes for addressing productivity, elevating employee engagement strategies, and incorporating candidate experience best practices.

Let’s take a look at those “can-dos” and how this panel suggests California employers (and employers everywhere) move forward in 2025.

1. Train Your Leaders to Retain Your Teams

Stephen, who has a mechanical engineering degree and has worked in “just about any role you can imagine in a manufacturing environment, from assembly to team lead to operations supervisor,” addressed the impressive retention power that today’s leaders and managers have. He explained how investing in the development of managers is one of the most important investments California employers can make for their overall workforce health.

Solid leadership training is vital to ensuring that the people on the very front lines of the business can manage the challenges they face while effectively supporting the workers they lead. That training increases stability, which in turn fuels employee satisfaction and retention. We all want to work in places where the work is done well and the leaders are competent. Building management teams that are competent creates a bedrock of workforce stability with the strength (and skill) to retain talent.

2. Be the First to Reach Out

As businesses look to add to their teams, Pankaj reminded the audience of how job searches work from the candidate perspective:

  • 56% of people applying for a job apply after hours.
  • When someone applies for a job, they are usually applying for several jobs at once, rather than just your job.

What’s the lesson? That as an employer, you rarely, if ever, have the fixed attention of a job seeker. You are competing with other employers and with the busy lives of candidates. One important advantage you can have is to be the first to reach out. Or, you could be the employer that reaches out after hours. Those organizations who can meet these candidates early and creatively in the search process are going to be the organizations that recognize key hiring trends and opportunities and win the race for strong talent.

3. Prioritize the Workplace Flexibility They Want

Employees today put a high value on flexibility. Stephen and Eric reminded the audience that overtime and compensation matter but so does taking care of employees from a job flexibility perspective. Are you making it possible for workers to have the chance to do things that matter in their personal lives like showing up to a kid’s play or game?

As Stephen put it, “providing flexibility means ensuring we can as a company still achieve our day to day workplace needs and productivity goals but also take care of our employees so they can show up refreshed, collaborate more, and allow us all to achieve more.”

4. Don’t Assume Employees’ Needs. Ask.

Along with the discussion of workplace flexibility came Eric Gregg’s reminder of the value of asking employees the right questions in order to build employee retention and attraction strategies that actually work. For example, effective workplace flexibility looks different at different workplaces. What are your employees asking for when they say flexibility?

Recent workforce transformations have taught us that certain workforce strategies (remote for example) are not one-size fits all. What works at company A will not necessarily work at company B. California employers understand this well. Some of the rules and regulations they face don’t affect their employees or their competitors in other states or countries.

Instead of implementing workforce flexibility programs because they sound right, work with your employees to figure out what works for them. Conduct a survey. Have managers ask questions. Run a pilot program. The biggest mistake employers make is applying a blanket rule or tool without engaging workers first. So start with your team and build from there.

5. Take Advantage of Reskilling Resources

From dedicated government reskilling programs and funds to the growing power of AI, California employers have strong ways to supplement and expand their workforce reskilling efforts. Pankaj reminded the audience that technology, specifically AI, has the ability to help employers bridge the gap between work as it is today and jobs of the future.

How do you turn a Developer today into an AI Quality Assurance Oversight Lead tomorrow? AI tools are helping employers analyze those questions and identify the skill gaps and training paths. California’s commitment to reskilling workers can be a tool employers leverage to supplement company training programs as more and more roles change with tech advances.

6. Rehumanize the Workplace and Candidate Experience

As the panel discussed the rise of automation and AI in the recruitment process, both Eric and Pankaj encouraged the search for balance. While AI can take on a great deal of manual work, AI cannot replace human engagement.

As employers automate parts of recruitment and hiring, Eric reminded the audience that it doesn’t necessarily mean cutting back teams. In fact, automation can create the time and space needed for the rehumanization of key parts of recruiting and management work. For example, many recruiters and sales people have lost in-person connection-building skills due relying on technology to build and be the network. As AI gets better and takes on more of the manual work, recruiters, customer services teams, and managers need to up their one-on-one personal engagement skills so their businesses can stand out as truly and richly human when and where it counts.

7. Build a Holistic, Compelling Employment Story

Eric reminded the audience that no employer will win on wages or pay rates every time. It’s just too competitive. Expectations for pay, especially in these high inflation days, are consistently high and the cost of living increases are even hard for employers to keep pace with.

What employers can do is create a richer story rooted in good pay practices and enriched in other workplace elements that your target employees and candidates value.Where are the places your business wins over other employees and delivers value to workers that doesn’t impact the business from an expense stand point? Is it workplace flexibility? Culture? Colleagues? Values? Community engagement? Examine what added values attract and retain talent–from workplace flexibility to culture–and build a compelling, values-driven employment story as a way to counterbalance wage competition.

8. Engage Community Partners to Build Tomorrow’s Talent

The rapid evolution of technology and business means skills are changing and advancing every moment. While investing in development today it is one way employers can keep pace, it’s not always enough to keep pace. Sometimes you need to stay ahead of the transformation, engaging talent today but also reshaping tomorrow.

The panel reminded attendees that across California there are community organizations, non-profits, government groups, and community colleges working to skill people for the jobs and opportunities of tomorrow. Businesses and industries that take the time to work with education and training partners to share how their workplaces are changing can help ensure that current and future workers are equipped with the skills employers require. It’s a partnership-driven way Californian businesses can help reduce skill gaps and create a more robust and resilient ecosystem of talent.

9. Factor Turnover’s Impact in Growth

Retention was heavy on the minds of both the audience and the panelists. The audience named retention as the second greatest barrier to growth in 2025 while each panelist spent time addressing the importance of investing in the retention of strong employees.

One clever insight from the discussion was to challenge employers to teach their leaders and managers to calculate turnover costs in lost growth, especially for roles that are revenue generating. When employees leave, employers often measure the loss in the “cost of replacing the person who left.” And those are high costs but the cost to growth is even steeper.

Eric shared that for revenue-generating roles, employers will see a six-month steep and downward drag on business growth.It’s a serious setback and the kind of knowledge that needs to be codified in management and leadership training. Poor hiring and high turnover are far more than a nuisance. They are a high-cost albatross that employers need to vanquish through strong retention and leadership training practices.

10. Stay Change Ready and Curious

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, millennial and Gen Z employees will make up 75 percent of the workforce. That means the workforce data most businesses are operating on right now is dated or will be out of date very soon. That’s an important reminder that now, more than ever, employers need to be both curious and ready to adapt.

Curiosity can be tackled with open dialogue, regular surveys, and strong leaders and managers who are engaged with their workforce. Flexibility and adaptiveness are a leadership mindset. Are business leaders able to accept the realities of how technology and generational shifts are remaking the employment landscape? Are they changing and growing alongside their evolving workforces?

As always, adaptation and innovation are key to remaining a functioning part of this marketplace. Luckily this is California, a state where innovation and change readiness have thrived. Embracing that spirit of change and growth will be a mark of success for California’s employers in 2025.

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