Will it ever be the same again? No.
An interesting proposition from Bill Gates,
"The only companies that will succeed will be those that obsolete their own products before somebody else does."
I really don't think that the recruitment industry as a whole has grasped how much change is going to come in the next few years. But it is certainly the employers who are antiquating their products right now.
Through financial necessity and improved online services, employers are no longer reliant on recruitment companies to recruit their hires and are going directly to the source themselves - online. Invariably employers are finding the majority of the right talent through job boards and online tools and have begun to question what value recruitment companies are adding in a world where they have access some of the best talent themselves.
Compound this with more people have been looking for work than ever before and not many have had a pleasant experience from the recruitment companies themselves. The knock on effect will continue to be tremendous, with those new employers becoming the hiring managers of the future.
It's obvious and a little trite to say it but the only recruitment companies that will survive will be the ones that really add value. That value has to be providing candidates that employers would not be able to find themselves. The directly sourced, true passive candidate will nearly always need to be approached discreetly by someone with market knowledge and experience. Whoever provides this type of talent will always be in demand and rightly so.
There is still a need to manage, filter and match the massive response levels for online applications which is time consuming for the client. Some recruitment companies are creatively offering this service in "unbundled packages" = cheap recruitment. But, if I were the client I would question the mercenary nature and the companies' long term plan for these services? "So you mean we could have done this before but you didn't tell me?" Nice.
There will be (and already are) some successful online recruitment companies but their model is based on competitive service and price from the start. Already adding value and providing effective response management and not tainted by being seen as a traditional recruitment company.
Will all traditional recruitment companies then become hybrids of response management and head-hunters? I doubt it, which profitable recruitment business would wish to cannibalise their fees? Which reasonably sized succesful recruitment business could effect such a seismic change? My thoughts are that there is certainly going to be a lot more treading on toes between the services offered by the consultancies, agencies and online recruitment companies. An increase in the success of the niche recruiter and growth of the dedicated online recruitment business.
And job boards? I am going to come on to them later, I think. I have spoken about it in the past but I think that there are some new developments that will be potential game changers and would like to throw them out there to see what people think.
As always, interested to hear the feedback and thoughts. There are some interesting debates going on within the Recruitment Futurology Group, feel free to get involved.
