The future of recruitment; where do we go from here?

Simple points reiterated; recession and a massive decrease in employment growth means that…

1. Employers are finally able to take a breath and look at strategic recruitment and recruitment strategies rather than ongoing reactive growth.
2. Recruitment budgets are being cut from advertising and consultancy fees.
3. Suppliers will have to become creative to match this change.

This is going to completely change the recruitment sector so this is the first of a mini series with my thoughts on how I think this will affect us all and ideas for change, firstly, this is what I think it could mean for the online recruitment industry…

• Job boards offering more recruitment services, not just through technology with price per placement but full “human” response management, blurring the lines between recruitment companies, advertising agencies and job boards. If I were a media owner with a portfolio of sites this is what I would explore immediately (Emap, Haymarket, Incisive, Centaur, UBM, RBI, step forward).
• Merger of the niche job boards to survive, either by acquisition or through centralised affiliation selling, creating gateway technology to host each others' jobs.
• Centralised out source of job board sales selling via networks to media houses (why doesn’t RBI already offer this service and re-sell other job boards?).
• The growth of the corporate job board built to compete against the job board sites (tesco.jobs anyone?).
• Rise of the widgets for aggregators, with targeted jobs placed on blogs and other social networks (www.jobamatic.com becoming the norm and provided by the aggregators).
• More focus on the employer brand and employee communication driven via job boards and social networks.
• Rise of the flat fee/low touch online recruitment service selling across networks of job boards.
• A welcome return for recruitment companies to actually provide real recruitment, with more demand for traditional search services regardless of the level.

What will hold the industry back from moving forward and taking this next stage effectively? The right people.

Despite what many may think - selling recruitment advertising is different to recruitment services and any company that will want to go through this route will need to carefully consider the strategy and who will implement it for them. All previous hires have been based on ability to sell ad space and increase revenue from that point of view, but this new world will require different skills.

 

There are big steps to take and the right strategy needs to be implemented thoughtfuly..

Please feel free to let me know your thoughts and whether you think this is all nonsense.

Comments

[Niall Kelly]

Steve, great thoughts here and yes, carnage out there for recruiters at the moment - Ireland is worse than anywehere as far as I can see as we had a huge housing boom here for 10 years and its all gone pete dong....Or whatever the movie was called :)

I run 4 niche boards over here in Ireland, and did 15 years Dublin / Sydney IT recruitment before that with my own agency so I have the best of both worlds so to speak.

We are coming up with new ways to grow revenue such as

1. working with affilliate partners, we recommend their services thru banners / eshots, etc and get a 25% kickback for new business.

2. Putting on seminars of interest to our target audience, eg Sales Expo '09 - 200 sales reps, plus 20 tables of companies trying to target sales people, SAGE etc - hotels doing v good deals at the moment.

3. reduce pricing by 50% to select agencies who are still doing well, rather than loose them completely - keeps jobs on the site and some revenue coming in.

4. stay on the phone and do exactly what you suggested, "know your not hiring now but perhaps for down the track, this is what we do, what we cost, do you think you might use us in 4 months??

5. ???