Each new year brings the usual glut of predictions about recruitment volumes, market changers, and mergers of providers as well as retrospective looks at where our business was and how it has evolved not to mention the breathless marketing promotions of products that will revolutionize recruiting. Some come to pass; most do not. That prompted a fellow professional to Global Contingent Workforce Management Services solicit some opinions as to what has actually changed in recruiting over the past decade or so.
From my perspective the overwhelming changes to recruiting have been in channels and mediums employed to facilitate communication between a company seeking to hire and a qualified candidates seeking opportunities. From Social Media as an outreach tool to almost paperless recruitment life cycles, much investment has been made in the vehicles of this essential communication. To a certain degree, with so many avenues of communication available, it is the message itself which has been neglected. To that end, a new focus and investment is emerging to address exactly that quality of communication to enhance candidate experience and to market a given company's employment value proposition (EVP).
Recruiting itself is becoming more organized and defined by companies as a process with points of measurement. Standards are emerging for internal and outsourced recruitment (RPO), with benchmarks to measure performance and process improvements. This means better visibility into recruitment costs and control of outcomes, aided by technologies that track and report on drill-down activities, not just net end results.
Finally, over the past few years and continuing forward, we see a trend by companies to globalize their core operations including recruitment, and in doing so, are looking to their partners and providers to erase the traditional distinction between Contingent Labor and Direct Hire, and provide more holistic solutions that address Total Workforce Management, leveraging Global Contingent Workforce Management Services both technology and services to combine similar front-end talent attraction activities and other like processes in tandem to gain efficiencies and economies of scale.
In conclusion, while recruiting is being further defined, standardized and globalized, and the tools and medium of the message have evolved, recruiting itself, the act of matching qualified candidates with client needs/requisitions, remains largely unchanged as a function, albeit one that is gaining more recognition and visibility as key performance area tied directly to business strategy execution and outcomes.