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Executive Recruiting: Where it’s Going And Where It Will Be In 2020

Predicting the future is a blurry prospect at best. But when we peer into the year 2020 it’s clear that the recruiting business will at once remain essentially the same and be fundamentally different. This may seem contradictory but it isn’t. At its core, recruiting and staffing is based on personal relationships in which providers identify, qualify and deliver the right people with the right skills for the right positions. That won’t change regardless of how many walls, moats, and drawbridges efficiency experts erect between clients and recruiting and staffing firms. The business will retain its core benefit: bringing added value to clients through one-on-one transactions.

On the other hand economic, cultural and technological forces are radically changing accepted approaches to recruiting, bringing both beneficial and adverse effects to traditional models. Globalization, outsourcing, increasing talent shortages, shifting social values, the diversity movement, and the very definition of what constitutes a job are transforming the ways corporations and institutions hire, staff and retain employees.

In recent years, particularly since the burst of the dot-com bubble, job placement for large companies has become a procurement process conducted by the same departments responsible for purchasing office supplies, nuts and bolts, and other commodity items and services. The primary mission of these operations is a relentless drive to reduce costs through annual bids. Sophisticated software analysis tools calculate time and money involved in bringing new hires on board and reward the most productive providers. Efficiency reigns, but when it comes to retaining recruiting and staffing services, the criteria of best price/best supplier often poses a contradiction in terms.

Vendor managed systems (VMS) that procurement operations rely upon also arm human resource departments with metrics to assist them in long-range hiring requirements and in tracking employee performance throughout their careers with a company. VMS also provides the framework for processes that bring new recruits to large corporations. A steady supply of candidate resumes from global databases maintained by large recruiting/staffing firms feeds into these systems, each sorted and categorized to fit specific job descriptions. Client VMS technology is approaching greater commonality, making it easier for recruiting and staffing firms to adapt their systems to whatever is in use. By 2020 just about any candidate resume in the world that offers special skills will be captured and processed in these databases.

Resumes that escape global databases will be found in online job boards, social networking sites, and other realms of cyberspace. Three quarters of all job applications are now made through the Internet, and by 2020 virtually all of them will be. Social networking sites now surpass print media in recruitment marketing, while corporations conduct virtual job fairs and invite candidates into their daily blogs. One thing is clear: in a few short years and certainly by 2020, anyone, anywhere seeking employment will have worldwide exposure.

The rise of the consultants
To focus on their core competencies and in their never-ending search for efficiency and cost cutting, many large corporations are outsourcing almost total responsibility to global consulting firms for overseeing human resource operations. Working with clients, consulting firms use preferred supplier lists that invite qualified staffing and executive recruiting firms to bid on contracts. To complete the chain, primary suppliers often outsource portions of their contracts to regional and niche-market firms, including those that focus on healthcare, accounting, IT and other specific skills.

One result is that a handful of recruiting firms are becoming dominant in a global arena where smaller shops can’t compete. It’s happening now as national clients in the U. S. grow into global accounts. By 2020 there will be a web of interdependent firms operating through management systems that bring job candidates to global clients. In many cases there will be single points of contact and one invoice to cover all services, regardless of how many firms are involved in the provider network. Corporations may not know, or even care, who is handling assignments in regional markets within this collaborative infrastructure.

The cost of insurance, time-intensive background checks, and the sheer volume and efficiencies required to compete disqualifies independent regional and niche-specialty firms from bidding for global assignments. These firms will continue to serve mid-level companies that do not have worldwide reach or ambitions. They also will be retained by global players when expertise in their markets is needed. But the reality is that thousands of regional firms will either be acquired or close up shop by 2020.

Rather than accept permanent roles as preferred suppliers and to eliminate barriers separating them from clients, global recruiting firms will make the leap into consulting. Many are taking first steps in this direction, acquiring consulting firms and introducing high-level consultants into their officer ranks. In this expanded role, recruiting firms will serve as strategic partners with their clients, helping devise and carry out long-range plans for effective deployment of human capital. This will include strategies that balance long-range executive succession plans, and full-time employees with contingency staffing and outsourcing to meet employment requirements over a period of years.