Recruitment Networking 2001

As the final year of the millennium comes to a close it's an appropriate time to reflect on trends that were prevalent over the year and draw connections to those that will follow. A brief overview:

• The number of online recruiting services will continue to increase. Recruiters are still very volatile electronic consumers as most are still experimenting with a variety of services. With so many services falling short of recruiters' expectations we will witness continued improvements to existing models and introductions to many new ones, however, we should expect a decline overall in new services compared to recent years.
• The more popular e-cruiting services and tools will continue to improve in efficiency and sophistication. Those that remain static are not likely to survive, as the demand for talent, a more competitive marketplace and a more knowledgeable consumer base will dictate more sophisticated solutions.
• By year's end very few organizations will be left without an e-cruiting presence. In fact we'll observe a large percentage of organizations making a transition from simply having an e-cruiting presence to formalizing a more proactive e-cruiting strategy.
• The number of new e-cruiting information providers (e-zines, e-books, etc.) will continue to increase as the demand for reliable industry analysis will be created to help recruiters make decisions regarding what services and strategies are most effective. This will likely come in the form of more specialized information sources catering to niche market segments.
• A trend will develop among service providers toward marketing the effectiveness of systems as opposed to mere efficiency. Marketing trends in 2000 were focused on promoting volume. The volume of resumes in databases, number of job posting destinations, number of visitors, client lists, relevant cost and time saving are all common selling features. Look forward to a marketing trend that promotes solutions. As recruiters' e-cruiting knowledge base and experience continue to sharpen it will become more difficult to influence buyers based on statistics. Solutions oriented marketing will overshadow the statistic based "follow the leader because we are the leader" approach. Statistics will instead be used to reinforce consumer confidence in the solutions being promoted.
• The Internet is a community made of smaller communities. Many recruiters view the Internet as a medium that provides a lot of different recruiting services. As they become more comfortable with the idea that people settle into communities pertaining to their interests and professions they will rely less on single function tools and begin to explore segments as networking niches.
• With the increasing popularity of interactive services like chats, forums and messengers look for many e-cruiting service providers to integrate them into their products as new service features as opposed to reserving them strictly for discussion purposes.
• E-cruiting training programs will continue to proliferate as the market changes and matures. Training programs will not likely become an industry standard within the next year but as the Internet and recruiting become synonymous, formal training, will be a given for newbies and the more proactive types alike.

This will be the final edition of Recruitment Networking Online this year. Have a safe and joyous holiday from all of us at RecruitersCafe and we wish you continued recruitment networking success in 2001! Nelson Abreu