Does in-house recruitment have a future?

I’ve recently had some very interesting debates that centre on the question: Will my job in HR recruitment still exist in the future?

Only a generation or two ago, my job didn’t exist, and 'human resources' wasn't a term in use. Personnel was only just emerging from a lot of the studies in psychology in the 1950s and 60s.

So it’s almost a bit too scary to ask if it will still be in existence in just 10-15 years time. But things are changing in the workforce world pretty rapidly.

In my last blog: 'External vs in-house recruitment', I talked about different recruitment models and how they might work for some organisations depending on size, structure etc. But how about rapidly advancing technology and efforts to streamline law firms - what do these mean for the future of the recruitment industry and the role of the HR recruiter?

Firms might go down the outsourcing route - after all, the model is already in existence and businesses are getting more and more comfortable with outsourced/managed service models. Now a few firms are trying out life with an in-house, outsourced recruiter business.

As a society we’ve learned lessons from bad outsourcing experiences - so surely we can apply them to recruitment to get a great outcome? Recruitment has a price tag attached, but at least you know up front what your costs will be and you can also see your projected savings. If this model emerges as the way forward, then this might be the end of the in-house recruiter job.

But what about DIY recruitment? This is where I believe things might develop in a very exciting way, especially with advancements in technology - the frontier where no man has gone before (to quote Star Trek).

In the last decade we’ve seen a shift from the traditional advertising in newspapers to the dominance of online job boards, and now it’s all social networking. LinkedIn should be pretty familiar to us all - it started as a professional networking tool but has rapidly been adapted (exploited?) for recruitment purposes. Agencies and in-house recruiters have been quick to jump on this wagon to attract the ‘passive candidate’.

But technology doesn’t stand still. One of the great things about social networking, online databases/communities is that you can find exactly what you’re looking for without having to sift through myriad CVs that come as part of the general advertising process.

There are a couple of barriers - one of these is ownership of candidate databases. Job boards have got clued up and will let you have access to their database for a fee (to see active candidates); companies have established their own databases (but the candidate pool quickly becomes out of date), and there are online skill-based communities which are rich with relevant, but passive, candidates.

What if future developments in technology see the barriers break down between all these different candidate pools - one big community of candidates that every organisation has access to, where your database is my database and vice versa?

In this scenario, there is a fabulous future for the in-house recruiter - someone who knows how to tap into the resource pool and deliver the goods for the company. Watch this space, the times they are a-changing...