canadian headhunter

Lagging Indicator

It seems that the Internet has finally begun to affect the executive search industry.

In the early days those involved in the online recruitment industry faced challenges in convincing recruiters that the internet was a worthwhile medium for advertising jobs and finding candidates. Even today many corporate organizations are still unaware of the benefits of internet recruitment and the need to understand and implement internal processes to deal with recruiting online. Along side these early experiences executives themselves had concerns regarding placing their personal and career details onto an online database.

Today recruiters view advertising "online" as part of their recruitment process and now believe a wider "pool" of candidates can be found through the internet. The use of online job boards in many cases has replaced the role of researchers. Recruitment companies now pay for the service and take up by corporate companies is forecasted to rise substantially in the coming years.

Beware of any article that says the new technology will replace the human aspects of the recruitment process. I don't see the demand for researchers who do the front end work on many searches disappearing anytime soon. It is my opinion that search firms will expect researchers to be aware of on-line recruitment methods and have access to the various databases necessary to pull candidates off the internet if necessary.

Remember that on-line recruiting is another variation of newspaper advertising. The candidates tend to be active job-seekers. Recruiters have always excelled at finding candidates who are not active but are "passive" candidates. This demand will not change.

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