I thought that this was going to be a difficult post to write especially when the recruitment industry and hiring and firing in general is in turmoil right now, but when I got down to it my Top 10 predictions just fell out!

1. Recruiters stop using job boards to attract candidates and only use web apps in conjunction with revamping the job tab on their own website.  The real (if difficult) birth of cloud recruiting begins.

2. Recruitment agencies halve (or more) their percentage fee.  Tons of these guys will go out of business in 2009 (except for the ones that have a monopoly or add value).

3. Google comes up with an imaginitive way of finding and recruiting people.

4. Less and Less “career advice”, and more and more “how to keep a job advice” appears on those job boards that think we actually read that stuff!

5. The big job boards (Monster, Jobserve et al) begin to stagger around a little punch drunk.  They’re being hit from a lot of different directions these days (Facebook, LinkedIn et al) and no matter how much they try and change the colour of their spots they’re still the same old dinosaur and can’t adapt to the planet’s changing economic conditions.  They’re in the wrong game now and this year they may start to realise it!

6. Something really useful in the recruitment world will catch fire for mobiles that will change the whole game.

7. Buy-up of other job boards to reduce competition and try and keep revenue streams from drying up.

8. People/Job networking sites to rise and rise, although where there revenue streams will come from is anyones guess.

9. YouTube video shorts promoting companies, individual departments or individuals will put on a growth spurt but YouTube will need to add a smarter interface if it’s going to work.

10. The term “Personal branding” is dusted off, given some new spin to the point where it actually takes off.

I spotted an article by Peter Weddle, CEO of Weddles.com where he uses the much touted Googlized/O’Reilly term of “Cloud Computing” and attempts to put a different spin on traditional recruitment. Unfortunately the vision he presents falls short of the mark in terms of a utopian recruitment cloud.

Let’s re-visit where “Cloud Computing” comes from.

Think of the heady days where the IBM mainframe was king and dumb terminals accessing locked down applications were all users could hope for. Sure enough, the rebellion against centralised control came with the personal computer. What goes around comes around and “Cloud Computing” now makes things surprisingly centralised again but this time it’s a lot more accessible and the choice of applications will be vast. Power to the user! Let’s take a look back at the recruitment industry.

What we have is 1001 generic job boards and 1001 specific job boards competing for the same thing - prospective candidates’ personal data. Job boards are building their own islands of data around which they put up their credit card barriers. They make their profit from recruiters wishing to advertise job vacancies on one hand and employers/agencies accessing their CV databases on the other as well as the usual plethora of site ads. What about the recruitment agencies? How do they fit into this picture? Well they don’t want to pay money to the Job Boards to get peoples’ data so they’re all building their own data islands too by essentially cold calling people and extracting information about other prospective candidates and storing this information for themselves. Hardly efficient, but when everyone wants a slice of the employer’s pie (fixed fee or percentage) then who can blame them? Let’s apply the vision of “Cloud Computing” back to the recruitment industry and define what “Cloud Recruiting” should be from an employer’s point of view.

• We want access to a vast pool of resources
• We want to find people quickly
• We want to know if they have the right skills
• We want to see when they’re available
• We want information about how good they are
• And MOST of all
• We want all of this to be FREE!

Curiously the same “wants” are identical for agencies but it’s not surprising as they are acting as a specialised, out-sourced HR department. For people seeking work (or wondering what opportunities are out there), there are a different set of values.

• We want to publicise ourselves
• We want to control the information people see
• We want to control how people interact with us
• We want to share our ideas with our peers
• We want all of this to be FREE!

We need to flip this whole thing on its head and give the power to the users…well they own the data!

Just as “Cloud Computing” is applications on tap, “Cloud Recruiting” should be a pipeline of people. The recruitment industry now needs to get its head up in the clouds rather than sticking it firmly in the sand.