24 HR Buzzwords to Know in 2025

Keeping up with emerging trends and language is essential for HR professionals to stay ahead of the curve. Buzzwords often highlight the challenges and opportunities that define the modern workforce, offering insights into employee expectations, organizational behaviors, and technological advances. Below is a dictionary of the top 24 HR buzzwords you’ve heard—and will keep hearing—in 2025. Listed alphabetically, we’ll cover what they mean, why they matter, and how HR pros can incorporate them into their strategies to drive growth and engagement throughout the year.

1. Anti-Perks

According to Jumpstart, anti-perks are “Benefits that sound great on paper but are actually never useful to employees.” Anti-perks are seen as irrelevant or superficial by employees. This includes things like free snacks, open office plans, or company offsites that don’t address meaningful needs.

Why It Matters: Anti-perks reflect the growing disconnect between employee needs and outdated benefit programs that cater to past workforce demands and trends. “Employees are not interested in elaborate perks. They just want to work, go home and have clear work-life boundaries. If any of the benefits keep them in the office for longer than necessary, they will not appreciate it. Instead, they will view it as a red flag,” shares Jumpstart. 

HR Strategy: Conduct regular surveys to understand what employees truly value in their benefits packages to ensure your perks are not anti-perks. Focus on initiatives that support financial security, mental health, and career growth, such as robust health plans, professional development budgets, and hybrid work flexibility.

2. App Sprawl

This HR buzzword can be defined as the use of too many disconnected or underutilized workplace applications, leading to inefficiency and frustration across the organization, including HR.

Why It Matters: App sprawl impacts productivity and employee satisfaction as workers waste time navigating fragmented tools. As HR teams adopt an increasing number of technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more widely used, app sprawl can work against HR efforts to increase efficiency, hiring quality, and more. Streamlining technology to essential platforms and integrating tools into your existing tech stacks is critical for workplace and HR efficiency.

“Flawed purchasing decisions and poor governance of existing technologies can often lead to problems such as too many HR software-as-a-service (SaaS) licenses going unused, costly redundancies, and data security issues when legacy platforms aren’t decommissioned as new ones come online, and missed opportunities when HR departments can’t take advantage of innovative features in new software releases from technology vendors,” according to SHRM.

HR Strategy: Evaluate your tech stack annually and identify overlapping, redundant, and underused tools to prevent app sprawl. Consolidate where possible, ensure all tools are user-friendly, and leverage all available integrations to create a unified tech stack. 

Consider expanding the use of existing tools to incorporate new functionality rather than adding additional tools. For example, if your pre-hire assessment vendor also provides video interviewing and reference checking, like Cangrade, consider replacing or avoiding onboarding new software for those purposes. For new and existing technologies, offer training to help employees make the most of essential platforms.

3. Bare Minimum Mondays

BambooHR defines the Bare Minimum Mondays as “when employees choose to do the least amount of work required on Mondays to ease into the workweek. The basic premise is that by having the freedom to remain low-key on the first day of the week, employees will be able to reduce feelings of work-related anxiety on the weekend (goodbye Sunday Scaries!) and save energy to tackle the rest of the week with a little more enthusiasm.” 

Why It Matters: This HR buzzword highlights the importance of mental health and employee well-being while acknowledging the prevalence of burnout in today’s workforce. HR leaders must prepare for the Bare Minimum Monday trend to maintain engagement and productivity.

HR Strategy: Clue your managers into the signs of Bare Minimum Mondays so they can identify the employees who might need additional support or flexibility as it happens. Enable them with strategies and techniques to evaluate if there are performance or well-being concerns that need to be addressed or if the employee simply organizes their work week differently. Then you can partner to re-engage and support the mental health of those employees as needed. 

Across your organization, recognize the importance of mental health and encourage flexible scheduling to allow employees to find a rhythm that suits them. Consider implementing low-pressure team check-ins or quiet focus time on Monday mornings to support productivity if burnout is prevalent. 

4. Breadcrumbing

Breadcrumbing is a term you might be familiar with in the realm of personal relationships. Professionally, this HR buzzword means when organizations make vague promises of promotions, raises, or career opportunities but fail to deliver. Or, as Fairy Godboss explains, “the act of leaving small crumb trails to string you along…If you find yourself stuck in what too often feels like a dead-end job, but you feel enticed to stick around because of an ever-illusive future, you might be a victim of breadcrumbing.”

Why It Matters: Whether it’s managers or your HR team who are breadcrumbing employees, it erodes trust, drives turnover, and hurts employee morale making it a significant risk for retaining top talent in 2025. 

HR Strategy: Build trust through transparent career progression plans rather than breadcrumbing to retain talent. And ensure your managers do the same. Prioritize internal mobility at your organization by facilitating promotions, lateral moves, and leadership pipelines with programs and processes that managers, employees, and HR can follow. Implementing internal talent marketplaces like Cangrade’s can ease execution and improve the visibility of internal opportunities to your talent. Then clearly communicate timelines, criteria for advancement, and regular updates on employee development opportunities.

5. Career Cushioning

“Career cushioning refers to the practice of employees taking proactive steps to secure their professional future, often in response to economic uncertainty or a desire for greater career mobility,” states Workable.

“This can involve activities such as networking, upskilling, building a personal brand, or exploring alternative job opportunities, all while remaining employed in their current role.”

Why It Matters: Employees career cushion for a few reasons, but most commonly because they are anxious about their job security or intend to leave your organization for more responsibility or pay. To improve morale and productivity, as well as attain high performers, HR leaders must address these concerns.

HR Strategy: HR leaders should take a two-pronged approach to career cushioning – one to address anxiety about job security and another to enhance development and mobility. 

Address anxiety about job security head-on. Dispell any rumors circulating about potential layoffs or downsizing that are not true and ensure managers are tuned into their teams so they can address these rumors as well. Foster a culture of transparency to demonstrate to employees that if any layoffs, re-orgs, or downsizing are to occur that they won’t be kept in the dark.

To build mobility and development, offer additional personalized training opportunities, access to certifications, robust learning programs, and implement transparent processes and technologies to support promotions and lateral moves. This will reduce the need for employees to seek external options and increase loyalty to the organization.

6. Coffee Badging

This HR buzzword is defined by teambuilding.com, “Coffee badging occurs when employees go to the office, have a coffee, and then leave to work elsewhere. Usually, these workers come into the office late and leave early.

“By making an appearance, employees earn their ‘badge’ for the day despite not working in the office. ‘Badging’ may also refer to employees swiping their badges to get attendance marks. These staff aim to meet attendance policies while spending little time in the office.

“Employers often refer to coffee badging as presenteeism’s modern cousin. Presenteeism occurs when employees come to work when sick or injured. Thus, workers are ‘present’ but not efficient.”

Why It Matters: Coffee badging can highlight the misalignment of leadership’s desire for in-person attendance and visibility and employees’ need for hybrid or remote work flexibility. This in turn can decrease productivity, engagement, and retention as employees see office attendance as a necessary evil and therefore look for positions more suited to their needs.

HR Strategy: Partner with your leadership team and managers to shift the emphasis from physical presence to performance and outcomes. Ensure your promotion and compensation plans avoid recency bias so managers are not promoting employees who are most visible rather than your highest performers. 

If in-office attendance is required, consider the financial and time costs associated with commuting and how your company can alleviate some of the burden. Create hybrid work schedules that encourage in-person attendance for collaboration and innovation, while maintaining flexibility. 

7. Culture Carrier

“A ‘culture carrier’ is someone around whom a company’s culture develops,” shares Bravely. “They possess a great deal of institutional knowledge, they’re an embodiment of the company values, and they’re someone others want to be around. For the company, culture carriers are indispensable.”

Why It Matters: Culture carriers are critical for preserving and promoting a strong organizational culture, especially in hybrid or remote settings. Knowing who your culture carriers are, how to retain them, and how to develop new culture carriers is key to a healthy workplace culture.

HR Strategy: Develop a system to identify your current culture carriers and who could become one, including your criteria for what makes a culture carrier at your organization. Then celebrate them and provide them with leadership opportunities. Consider involving them in onboarding programs and leveraging their influence to strengthen your company culture.

8. Digital Nomad

Rippling defines this HR buzzword as “an individual who uses technology to work remotely while traveling or living in different locations, often across the globe. They typically do not have a fixed office and rely on digital tools to perform their job from anywhere with an internet connection.”

Why It Matters: Digital nomads represent a demographic of talent that HR must cater to, especially in remote and hybrid workplaces. This includes balancing compliance and productivity concerns, ensuring engagement in company culture to avoid isolation, and providing flexibility without damaging work-life balance.

HR Strategy: Here are three approaches to accommodate digital nomads in your workforce: 

• Build clear remote work policies that address time zones, tax considerations, and compliance with local laws.
• Consider creating a digital nomad program that includes logistical support, such as co-working space memberships or travel stipends. 
• Develop strategies to involve digital nomads in your company culture, like virtual new-hire welcome meetings or town halls, and parameters around working hours to ensure they stay engaged and prevent burnout.

9. Emotional Proximity

“Emotional proximity is ‘feeling seen’ — when employees feel they are valued, important and have an impact on others. Emotional proximity drives greater connectedness than physical, but it is more likely to happen when there is physical proximity,” according to Gartner.

Why It Matters: Emotional proximity fosters trust, collaboration, and engagement, all of which are vital in retaining talent and maintaining team cohesion. In hybrid and remote work environments, emotional proximity is a critical component of a high-functioning workplace.

HR Strategy: Here are five strategies you can deploy to foster emotional proximity in your organization:

• Train managers in empathetic leadership. Guide your managers and leaders in how to demonstrate concern and understanding for their team members.
• Make your employees feel valued. Regularly recognize your employees and celebrate milestones to strengthen relationships and show employees you care.
• Set up regular check-ins. Ensure your managers are meeting with employees weekly to answer questions, give feedback, manage workloads, and support development.
• Promote open communication. Be transparent in sharing organizational updates and provide avenues for employees to provide input and feedback.
• Support employee well-being beyond work. Beyond empathetic leadership, offer benefits to support the challenges employees may face outside of work like caregiving benefits, time off, mental health resources, and flexible schedules.

10. EX (Employee Experience)

“Employee experience (EX) is how employees feel about everything they encounter throughout their employee journey. From the time they apply for a job until well after they leave an employer, the entirety of their material and relational interactions shape their perception of the organization,” shares Erik van Vulpen of AIHR.

“Employees are the organization’s internal customers, so it must understand their needs, expectations, and fears. Understanding how situations come across to employees helps you define problems and come up with solutions.”

Why It Matters: EX is directly tied to engagement, retention, and overall company success. Studies have shown that companies that provide a better employee experience see a direct impact on their revenue and sales. In addition, a positive EX boosts your talent brand, customer satisfaction, retention, productivity, and engagement, and fills your pipeline. 

On the flip side, a negative EX can have widespread negative impacts and damage the organization’s reputation.

HR Strategy: Developing a standout EX takes commitment and time from your HR and organizational leadership, so ensure you have buy-in to create change. Design an end-to-end employee experience strategy that encompasses the physical, digital, and cultural experiences of your employees from recruitment through offboarding. Prioritize inclusivity and belonging, well-being, development, mobility, and recognition at every stage. Then leverage employee feedback to improve processes and invest in the necessary tools to enhance your workforce’s day-to-day tasks.

11. Fauxductivity

Happy shares this definition of the newest version of the previous HR buzzword “productivity theater.” “Fauxductivity is the illusion of being productive. It’s the act of staying busy—often frantically so—without delivering meaningful results. Fauxductivity can look impressive from the outside, but it does little to advance personal, team, or organizational goals. Instead, it creates a cycle of activity that feels important but fails to generate value.”

Why It Matters: Fauxductivity can create a toxic environment where appearances are valued over outcomes, harming morale and efficiency.

“It might look impressive on the surface, but behind the scenes, fauxductivity erodes the soul of a workplace. It chips away at employee engagement, saps team morale, and stifles the innovation and energy that drive real success,” states Happy.

“Think about the impact on an employee who starts each day motivated to make a difference, only to be swept into a cycle of unending meetings, redundant reports, and overplanning. Their potential gets buried under tasks that feel important but ultimately lead nowhere. Over time, they begin to feel invisible, their contributions unrecognized, their purpose diminished. Fauxductivity doesn’t just waste time—it wastes people,” Happy continues.

HR Strategy: Shift away from the belief that employees must be “always on.”  Ensure your teams are focusing on output rather than on time spent and activity. Clearly define goals and success metrics for all roles, and encourage honest conversations about workload. 

Offer training on effective time management to ensure employees are prioritizing the most important tasks, reconsider the necessity of meetings that don’t have a goal or purpose, and discourage performative work practices by modeling transparency and prioritizing results.

12. Ghost Jobs

“Ghost jobs are online listings for roles that are not actually available. Companies might post a ghost job to gauge the talent market, fulfill an internal requirement or impress investors, but they have no intention of hiring for the position at that moment,” according to BuiltIn.

Why It Matters: Misleading job seekers by posting ghost jobs creates a poor candidate experience and can damage your organization’s employer brand, making it harder to attract top talent. If your ghost jobs are being posted unintentionally, it can highlight errors being made either by your team members or your technology and integrations. Both of which require solving.

HR Strategy: Identify any ghost jobs your organization has posted on job boards or through your careers site and their root cause. Were they intentional or accidental? From there, develop your strategy.

If they were posted because of an error, determine if it was a process issue that needs fixing, like a lack of communication when a role has been filled, or a technical issue, like an applicant tracking software (ATS) continuing to push to job boards. Then partner with your team and software partners to rework your systems.

If your ghost jobs are intentional, then be transparent in your hiring practices. Regularly audit job postings and communicate the purpose behind open roles. Misleading candidates can cause long-lasting damage to your candidate experience and employer brand which you should weigh against the benefits.

13. Hush Trips

Hush trips are defined by HR Morning as “when employees’ getaways overlap with their working hours and days, but they don’t tell you where they’re working and they allow time for exploring and relaxing.”

Why It Matters: Hush trips are often a source of worry for leaders as it’s perceived that employees will not be as productive if they’re working while on a trip. However, more so, hush trips underscore the growing desire for flexible work, burnout in your organization, a lack of trust, and/or the need for clear communication about expectations in remote work policies. All of which are HR’s responsibility.

In addition, hush trips come with potential compliance, legal, and data security issues that must be prevented.

HR Strategy: To best prevent hush trips at your organization, if they are a source of concern, first work to discover why employees are taking them – is it burnout, mistrust, a need for more flexibility? From there, you can develop strategies to address the causes to nip hush trips in the bud. 

However, if it’s unclear, implement policies that address employees’ want of flexibility while ensuring they remain accountable. Clearly outline expectations for productivity, security, and communication while traveling. Review your workplace culture to ensure you’re promoting open communication and transparency instead of secrecy to build trust so employees openly share when they’re planning a trip.

14. Hustle Culture

“Hustle culture is a push to work harder to get ahead by any means necessary, often at the expense of self-care and the employee’s mental and physical health. In hustle culture, overworking is glamorized and seen as a badge of honor.

“The pervasive narrative is that in order to achieve their professional goals, employees must succumb to this ceaseless pressure to perform better, as they’re bound by unrealistic standards and goals.” shares WorkHuman. 

Why It Matters: Hustle culture ultimately leads to employee burnout. 8% of workers from eight countries are currently struggling with burnout, according to a recent study by BCG, which inevitably leads to turnover.

Hustle culture can result from leadership and management pushing employees to work long hours or pick up additional shifts, either through explicitly asking or by example. HR sees this result in a toxic work culture, burnout, a decline in employee wellbeing, and ultimately, turnover.

Employees are pushing back against hustle culture. And as they do so, HR leaders must prioritize mental health and work-life balance to prevent burnout and disengagement.

HR Strategy: Combatting hustle culture requires your leaders to set an example. Stress the importance of your leadership team taking vacation and sick time, modeling reasonable working hours, and normalizing boundaries. Ensure your leadership and management also acknowledge the importance of their employees’ well-being privately and publicly while also implementing benefits like mental health days, flexible scheduling, and wellness programs. 

Investigate if your team is underresourced, dealing with high workloads and unrealistic timelines, or under pressure to work additional hours. If so, look into ways to support your team like adding headcount or contractors and training your managers.

15. Lazy Girl Jobs

According to BetterTeam this HR buzzword, “refers to ‘jobs for lazy girls,’ which initially gives the concept a negative connotation, but in reality, it is used in a satirical way. The trend aims to promote jobs that allow women to organize their work hours according to their personal lives and not the other way around.”

“Typically, a ‘lazy girl job’ is an easy, nontechnical, white-collar job that requires little to no specific skills to be performed. The position can be filled by a remote or hybrid-based employee and is generally computer-dependent, either focusing on data entry, administrative tasks, writing, or virtual communications.”

Why It Matters: Lazy girl jobs reflect a broader trend toward prioritizing quality of life over traditional definitions of career success and are a rally cry against burnout and hustle culture, which can influence recruiting, compensation, retention, and engagement strategies.

HR Strategy: Flexibility, autonomy, and fair compensation are top priorities for many employees today, not just those looking for lazy girl jobs. Benchmark compensation for all current roles to ensure you’re paying your existing team fairly and benchmark comp for new roles as well.

Enhance your workplace culture by putting an emphasis on psychological safety, flexibility, mental health, and employee wellbeing. These values will not only attract these candidates but will also build better engagement and loyalty with other employees as well. 

Work with managers to balance productivity with personal autonomy in their teams and to offer career paths that focus on individual strengths, allowing employees to grow at their own pace while maintaining balance.

16. Proximity Bias

Proximity bias is the unconscious tendency to favor people who are physically closer. “It’s defaulting to what’s most convenient and accessible. It isn’t inherently good or bad, but in a workplace with remote workers, proximity bias manifests in ways that reduce remote workers’ opportunities for success by giving preferential treatment to in-person workers,” according to Tango Analytics.

Why It Matters: Proximity bias can marginalize remote employees and create inequities in career advancement, undermining efforts to build an inclusive workplace.

“Every worker naturally exhibits proximity bias and can cause harm by overlooking remote colleagues, but it’s most problematic when it goes unrecognized in leadership personnel. Managers, supervisors, and executives have the most impact on advancement opportunities, task assignments, and employment, so their biases have far greater impact on the workplace,” Tango Analytics adds.

In addition to causing inequity, proximity bias can damage employee engagement and retention as remote employees are overlooked, foster discrimination in the workplace, and reduce work quality as proximity of an employee doesn’t necessarily mean high performance.

HR Strategy: Training leadership and managers is the first step in reducing the likelihood of proximity bias. Training should include how to:

• Evaluate all employees equitably, using performance metrics rather than visibility as the basis for rewards, promotions, or recognition. 
• Facilitate equal participation and opportunities for in-office and remote employees.
• Build relationships remotely.
• Communicate effectively and transparently to all employees.
• Make contributions from all employees visible.

In addition, research tools to help keep remote employees engaged and acknowledge everyone’s contributions.

17. Quiet Firing

This HR buzzword is defined as when organizations push employees to quit rather than firing them by withholding support, opportunities, or resources. Hubstaff shares these common ways quiet firing is often done:

• “Gradually reducing the employee’s responsibilities.
• “Providing little to no feedback or support
• “Intentionally excluding the employee from meetings
• “Generally creating an unwelcoming or unengaging work environment. 
• “Providing insufficient coaching, support, or career development opportunities”

Why It Matters: Quiet firing creates a toxic work environment that damages employee trust and engagement and the organization’s reputation, making it harder to attract and retain talent. In addition, turnover increases as employees leave resulting in knowledge loss.

HR Strategy: Equip managers with the tools and training to foster open communication, set clear expectations, and provide constructive feedback and support to underperforming employees. Establish systems for employees to voice concerns and ensure leaders are held accountable for treating all employees fairly.

If you find your organization is unintentionally quiet firing employees, investigate the upskilling opportunities you’re offering. Are they fair? Accessible? Are employees aware of them? If not, reworking these processes should result in a reduction in turnover and quiet firing.

18. Quiet Hiring

“Quiet hiring is when an organization acquires new skills without hiring any additional employees,” shares Personio. “Sometimes, that means taking on temporary workers like contractors, freelancers or gig workers. But more often, it refers to the practice of using existing employees to fill skills gaps. 

“Some companies do this by assigning certain employees to new roles where their skills are more valuable. Others help employees to expand their capabilities through training, upskilling, reskilling and stretch assignments.”

Why It Matters: Quiet hiring can be a cost-effective way to address skills gaps, improve retention and engagement, upskill your workforce, and promote internal mobility. However, without proper support and additional compensation for taking on expanded responsibilities, quiet hiring risks employee burnout and dissatisfaction. And for every internal move you facilitate, you’ll likely need to hire a backfill.

HR Strategy: Make quiet hiring a positive experience by offering fair compensation, reskilling opportunities, and transparent discussions about career advancement. Frame new responsibilities as opportunities for growth and recognize employees’ contributions to ensure they feel valued.

To identify quiet hiring opportunities, leverage soft skill assessments and talent intelligence, like Cangrade’s, to pinpoint potential internal candidates for open positions and provide learning and development (L&D) opportunities to upskill employees for future moves.

To assess the mutual success of your quiet hires, partner with managers to evaluate performance and conduct job engagement and satisfaction surveys.

19. Quiet Quitting

You’re likely familiar with this HR buzzword since it made news in 2022, but it isn’t fading anytime soon. Quiet quitting is when employees only do the bare minimum required for their role, often signaling disengagement. “This person won’t show up early or work late and is likely not interested in social or community initiatives the company might offer as part of organizational culture,” according to Simpplr.

“Although this employee meets the job description assigned to them, they are psychologically detached from their work. They are physically in the office, but are mentally at the beach.”

Why It Matters: Quiet quitting signals a disconnect between employees and their roles, presenting a risk to overall productivity and morale. Quiet quitting can be a result of conflict, a poor workplace culture, lack of resources, too high of a workload, low compensation, burnout, or personal reasons. 

To keep productivity and culture healthy, HR must work to combat the causes of quiet quitting.

HR Strategy: Addressing quiet quitting requires a holistic strategy that encompasses employee engagement, management, culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), mobility, internal communications, compensation, and more. 

Start by focusing on employee engagement strategies, such as recognition programs, compensation and benefits, and high-quality leadership and management. Evaluate the health of your company culture and employees’ workloads through job engagement surveys to ensure they feel valued without being overburdened and are happy at the company.

Simpplr shares these additional tips to address quiet quitting:

• Pay attention to employee engagement levels.
• Develop a strong internal communications strategy to share with and listen to employees.
• Foster an inclusive workplace. 
• Promote connection in the workplace. 
• Provide opportunities for career advancement and promotion. 

20. Quittok

Quittok is the trend of employees sharing their resignation stories or recording and posting their resignation on TikTok with the hashtag #quittok, often highlighting a negative employment experience. These public posts can go viral, resulting in millions of views and even press coverage of the company.

Why It Matters: Viral resignation stories can harm an organization’s reputation, making it harder to attract and retain top talent and creating public relations challenges.

HR Strategy: There are a few steps you can take to prevent becoming part of the #quittok trend:

• Learn why employees might be unhappy and actively address workplace concerns before they escalate. Foster open communication channels where employees feel safe sharing feedback internally.
• Monitor online sentiment around your employer brand and identify any themes in feedback about your organization. Pair this with a review of your culture and employee experience. Are there any elements that could lead to resentment or unhappiness?
• Act as if you’re being recorded during any sensitive conversations with employees. Train your HR team and your supervisors on how to handle these conversations professionally and make them aware of this trend.

If you’re already a part of Quittok:

• Question why these videos are being recorded. There’s likely valuable feedback and lessons to be learned from these employees quitting. By paying attention to why these videos are being posted, you can identify strategies to prevent them in the future. 
• Deploy PR and marketing. Workable shares this technique: “Try using the video as part of your own marketing efforts in the form of a video stitch. It’s a technique that allows you to combine an existing video on Tiktok (in this case, the video of the employee resigning) with a video you create… focus on how your organization is acting on that feedback to better meet employee needs moving forward.”

21. Shadow AI 

“Shadow AI is the unregulated, unauthorized use of AI within an organization without the knowledge or approval of IT or security teams. It’s the unsanctioned or ad-hoc use of AI within an organization that IT doesn’t know about,” explains WorkLife.

Why It Matters: Shadow AI can expose organizations to security risks and compliance issues, especially if sensitive or proprietary data is involved. If your organization’s IP or data is shared with an AI model that competitors are using, you also risk losing your competitive edge.

In addition to security and compliance issues, Shadow AI can decrease productivity and work quality if not used wisely.  Shadow AI contributes to app sprawl and increased task switching for employees, which can lead to less efficiency. If the work AI creates is not carefully checked, work quality can also suffer.

HR Strategy: To curb the use of shadow AI, partner with your IT leader to provide employees with company-approved AI tools and implement guardrails for using AI at your organization. Offer training to ensure employees understand policies around data security and the risks of shadow AI and can integrate AI safely and effectively into their day-to-day. 

Once rolled out, monitor tool usage and consistently update guardrails and approved tools to mitigate risks.

22. Skills Gap

This HR buzzword is defined by Gloat as “the disparity between the skills an employer expects their employees to have and the actual skills employees possess. This mismatch makes it challenging to fill open positions and execute high-priority projects.”

Why It Matters: Skills gaps can be problematic for organizational and employee performance. They can lead to inefficiency, underperformance, lack of innovation, and loss of revenue for your organization as employees lack the expertise needed. Ultimately, leaving your company unable to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, skills gaps also hinder employee advancement. Employees who miss the skills to get to the next level become stuck in their current roles and are unable to adapt, which can in turn effect engagement and retention.

HR Strategy: Talent intelligence is the key to developing strategic upskilling programs that close skills gaps. Conduct a skills gap analysis to identify and prioritize skills gaps in your organization. Soft and hard skills assessments, like Cangrade’s, can easily and efficiently pinpoint skills gaps at an individual, team, and organizational level. This data can then be leveraged to develop targeted and personalized upskilling programs that offer learning materials to employees in the way they prefer to learn (ex. video, in-person, interactive).

The talent intelligence you gain can also be used to set goals for employees, develop a leadership pipeline, and create development plans to align employees with future organizational needs,helping you close current and future skills gaps.

23. Social Loafing

“Social loafing, a phenomenon rooted in social psychology, refers to the tendency of individuals to exert less effort when working in a group compared to when they work alone,” according to Culture Monkey. “In the workplace, this behavior manifests when employees perceive their contributions as less noticeable or feel a diminished sense of personal accountability. The diffusion of responsibility within teams can lead to reduced individual performance, as workers assume that others will compensate for their lack of effort.”

Social loafing can easily be confused with free-riding, which is a different concept. Free riders do not contribute when in a group, taking advantage of their team members. With social loafing, members of the group do not work as hard as they would if working individually.

Why It Matters: Social loafing can undermine team performance, productivity, and morale. It reduces innovation as responsibilities are diffused across a group and visibility of individual performance is lowered. The lack of visibility and feedback, and perceived inequity of work can also lead to frustration among high-performing employees, resulting in heightened turnover.

HR Strategy: Preventing social loafing ultimately comes down to good leadership. Train your managers on this new HR buzzword and these techniques to prevent it:

• Assign clear individual responsibilities and goals within team projects and hold individuals accountable.
• Use project management tools to track contributions to foster accountability.
• Recognize and reward individual efforts while fostering a culture of collaboration.
• Leverage talent intelligence, like the motivations data gathered by Cangrade’s soft skill assessment, to customize motivations to each team member.
• Set up channels for feedback and meet with each team member one-on-one.
• Evaluate team workloads often.

24. White-Fonting

“White-fonting is the practice of adding keywords or job descriptions to a resume in a white font color that is visible to an ATS but not to the human eye of a recruiter. These keywords can manipulate an ATS or resume parsing tool by increasing the keyword relevance of resumes,” explains AMS Verified.

Why It Matters: White-fonting exposes flaws in ATS technology and underscores the importance of fair and efficient hiring practices that are not solely driven by resumes and cover letters.

This practice risks inundating your recruiters with underqualified candidates they still need to screen. If these candidates are not caught in the interview process, you risk hiring candidates who will underperform on the job. This can decrease in organizational success and ROI and increase turnover.

HR Strategy: If you believe your candidates are white-fonting, there are several steps you can take to detect it before your recruiters take the time to read a résumé:

• Enable white-fonting detection within your ATS, if available.
• Train recruiters to identify white-fonting by manually highlighting the text on a résumé so any text in white font becomes visible.

To prevent white-fonting from affecting your pipeline and candidate selection:

• Focus on crafting job descriptions and selection processes that prioritize genuine qualifications over keyword matches. 
• Update your hiring process to reduce reliance on résumés by incorporating soft and hard skills assessments.
• Assess candidates’ hard and soft skills early in the hiring process to weed out candidates who are not qualified before recruiters are involved.

Conclusion

The HR buzzwords of 2025 reflect the rapidly changing nature of the workplace, where technology, culture, and employee expectations intersect. By understanding and proactively addressing these terms when necessary, HR leaders can anticipate challenges, design effective solutions, and build inclusive, resilient workplaces that attract and retain top talent.

Discover how Cangrade’s talent intelligence solutions can help you build a workforce prepared for the future and the trends of 2025. Request a demo now.

You can also download a PDF copy of all 24 buzzwords in our 24 HR Buzzwords to Know in 2025 Guide.