In June 2024, Fuel50 launched a global research survey to understand the top priorities of HR leaders today, into 2025 and beyond. The goal was to uncover the key priorities, challenges, and talent technology needs that will shape the workforce landscape over the next 3 years.
We heard from 330 respondents: HR leaders spanning the US (51%) and UK (49%), across industries like healthcare, manufacturing, education, retail, finance, and technology.
These priorities reflect deeper organizational challenges and strategic pressures, rather than superficial wish lists.
From the urgent imperative to retain top talent, to the growing need to align employee skills with dynamic business demands –– these focus areas offer a revealing roadmap of where HR is headed in the years ahead.
Here are the top 5 priorities HR leaders set for their organizations for 2025.
Retaining top talent
Nearly 85% of surveyed HR leaders identified talent retention as their top priority heading into 2025, far outranking other critical initiatives like DEI and succession planning.
This overwhelming consensus shows how organizations are shifting their view of talent, seeing employees not just as replaceable resources, but as carriers of crucial institutional knowledge that’s increasingly difficult to replicate.
This creates an interesting paradox. While organizations are investing heavily in retention initiatives, many lack the fundamental infrastructure to understand what they’re trying to retain. According to our research, only 20% of these same organizations have implemented a systematic way to catalog and track their employees’ skills and capabilities.
We see this regularly among our customers at Fuel50 before they implement a talent intelligence solution. Organizations often realize they have limited visibility into the full scope of their employees’ capabilities, making it difficult to create meaningful retention strategies.
The stakes in this talent retention challenge have never been higher. Losing key talent doesn’t just mean losing current capabilities.
When a senior engineer leaves, they take with them not only technical expertise but also years of contextual knowledge about system evolution and decision rationales. When a product manager departs, they carry away a deep understanding of customer needs and market dynamics that took years to develop.
The hidden costs go far beyond the commonly cited replacement expenses. Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly found that external hires cost 18-20% more than internal promotions for the same role, perform worse for the first two years, and have higher exit rates.
Organizations are discovering that departed employees take with them informal collaboration networks, unwritten knowledge of process workarounds, and crucial customer relationships. These are assets that never appear on any balance sheet but significantly impact operational effectiveness.
Leading organizations are responding by fundamentally rethinking their approach to retention. Rather than focusing solely on traditional levers like compensation and benefits, they’re investing in systems that provide unprecedented visibility into their talent landscape.
These companies are creating detailed skills inventories that allow them to better understand, deploy, and develop their talent. This systematic approach not only improves retention by creating clearer growth pathways but also provides a strategic advantage in workforce planning.
Key takeaway: Start by mapping your organization’s current skills visibility. How much do you really know about your employees’ capabilities beyond their job titles? Are you aware of the hidden talents that could be deployed in different roles? Understanding this baseline is the first step toward building a more effective retention strategy for 2025 and beyond. Download our skills transformation roadmap to learn more about this.
Attracting top talent
Nearly 80% of HR leaders rank talent attraction as their second highest priority for 2025, placing it just behind retention.
Though, what’s notable is how dramatically the talent acquisition landscape has evolved since the post-pandemic era.
Traditional talent attraction methods are showing their age. Job boards, standardized job descriptions, and role-based hiring are increasingly ineffective in a market where skills requirements change faster than roles can be defined.
At Fuel50, we’re seeing our enterprise customers shift away from these traditional approaches, instead focusing on identifying and attracting talent based on skills and potential rather than just experience and titles.
The most forward-thinking organizations are discovering an unexpected advantage in their talent attraction efforts: strong internal mobility programs. Companies with robust internal career opportunities are reducing the costs associated with external hiring.
The logic is compelling: candidates are increasingly asking about growth opportunities during interviews, and organizations that can demonstrate clear pathways for skill development and career progression have a distinct advantage in the talent marketplace.
This has led to an interesting shift in talent attraction strategy. Rather than focusing solely on immediate role requirements, leading organizations are building talent attraction strategies around their skills architecture.
Instead of asking “Who can fill this role?” they’re asking “What skills do we need now and in the future, and how can we attract people with the potential to grow into those areas?”
Companies like Smartsheet and KeyBank are pioneering this approach. They’ve moved away from traditional job descriptions filled with long lists of requirements, instead focusing on core skills and growth potential. They’re also showcasing their internal mobility success stories in their recruitment efforts, effectively telling candidates: “Here’s not just the role you could have today, but the career journey you could experience with us.”
Key takeaway: Review your last five job postings. Are they focused on rigid role requirements, or do they communicate the skills journey a candidate could experience in your organization? Are you showcasing your internal mobility success stories in your recruitment process? The answers to these questions might reveal opportunities to modernize your talent attraction strategy for 2025 and beyond. Download our internal mobility guide.
Supporting employee career growth
Seventy-five percent of HR leaders identify supporting employee career growth as a critical priority for 2025.
This emphasis on career development represents a strategic shift: organizations are realizing that without robust growth opportunities, they risk more than just turnover. They risk becoming obsolete.
This pressure is transforming how organizations approach career development. The traditional model of vertical progression –– moving from analyst to manager to director ––no longer serves business needs.
Modern business challenges require employees who can move between functions, combine diverse skill sets, and quickly adapt to new areas, otherwise organizations would quickly become obsolete. A product manager who understands data science. A sales leader who can drive digital transformation. An engineer who can architect customer solutions.
Yet most organizations are trying to support these modern career needs with outdated infrastructure. Career paths are still defined by job titles instead of skills. Development conversations focus on the next promotion rather than skill acquisition. Training programs teach current role requirements rather than future capabilities.
The cost of this misalignment shows up in unexpected ways. According to Gartner, 53% of candidates say they would forgo 10% higher pay for more skill growth opportunities.
When employees can’t see clear growth opportunities, they leave. But they often take with them critical institutional knowledge and emerging capabilities that weren’t even listed in their job descriptions. The sales leader who became an expert in your new technology stack. The operations manager who developed advanced analytics skills. These hidden capabilities, developed through experience but never formally recognized, walk out the door.
Leading organizations are responding by rebuilding their career development infrastructure around skills rather than roles. They’re creating visibility into skill requirements across functions, equipping managers to identify and develop capabilities beyond job descriptions and giving employees tools to explore potential paths before committing to them.
Key takeaway: Map the last five internal moves in your organization. Were they traditional promotions or cross-functional moves that brought new capabilities to different areas? The pattern may reveal whether your career development approach is ready for 2025’s challenges. Download our talent retention guide to understand what drives today’s workforce.
Reskilling and upskilling
Seventy-four percent of HR leaders rank reskilling and upskilling among their top priorities for 2025.
The urgency becomes clear when you look at skill lifecycles. According to Deloitte, professional skills that once lasted 10-15 years now become outdated in 5 years or less. Because of this, organizations must rebuild their workforce capabilities twice as often, with half the time to do it.
Traditional learning and development can’t solve this equation. Sending employees to training sessions or online courses every few years worked when skill requirements evolved gradually. But when core capabilities become obsolete in 5 years or less, organizations face an impossible choice: constantly pull employees away from work for retraining or watch their workforce capabilities become obsolete.
AT&T’s $1 billion investment in retraining 250,000 employees is a palpable example of this. The company found that 100,000 of its employees were in roles that would be irrelevant within a decade due to technological changes. Rather than face massive layoffs and rehiring, they chose large-scale reskilling, a decision that helped them maintain continuity while transforming their capabilities.
The World Economic Forum puts this challenge in stark numbers. Fifty percent of all employees will need reskilling by 2025 due to technological advances. Progressive organizations are finding a better option, which is to integrate skill development into the actual work. Rather than treating learning as a separate activity, they’re redesigning work itself to build new capabilities.
Key takeaway: Since the shelf life of skills is depleting, you need to make sure you’re investing in your employees’ reskilling and upskilling efforts. Download our 2024 hot skills list to see skills your employees need to be competitive.
Supporting employee performance
Seventy-three percent of HR leaders identify supporting employee performance as a key priority for 2025.
This focus makes sense – as companies grapple with implementing AI, managing hybrid work, and adapting to market uncertainties, layoffs, the very definition of “good performance” keeps shifting and organizations are figuring out how to do more with less.
The challenge has become defining and measuring performance when work itself is fluid.
Let’s take a software company as an example. If that company’s product manager’s performance in 2019 was judged on standard SaaS metrics like user growth and feature adoption, by 2020, success meant supporting unprecedented spikes in remote collaboration. By 2022, it meant integrating AI capabilities. The same role, but radically different performance requirements within just three years.
This rapid evolution exposes the limitations of annual reviews and standardized metrics. When job requirements change quarterly, waiting a year to assess performance is like driving using only your rearview mirror. Companies need systems that can define, measure, and support performance in near real-time.
Failure to create and nurture these systems would create a cascade effect –– struggling employees lose confidence, engage less with new initiatives, and become more resistant to change exactly when adaptability is crucial. Supporting performance isn’t just about maintaining productivity; it’s about maintaining organizational agility.
Key takeaway: How quickly can your organization redefine performance expectations for a role when business needs change? If it takes longer than your business cycles, you may be setting up both employees and managers for failure. Download our guide to organizational resilience.
The Path Forward
The data tells a clear story. HR leaders know their priorities for 2025 – retain, attract, develop talent. But there’s a stark disconnect: while 73-85% prioritize these initiatives, only 20% have built the foundational infrastructure to execute them effectively.
Without skills libraries and workforce analytics, these talent ambitions risk becoming empty promises. 2025’s winners won’t just be those who prioritize talent; they’ll be those who first build the foundation to deliver on these priorities.
