Current Issues

A Decade of Recruitment: Then and Now

In January, HRworks celebrated its 10th anniversary of recruitment excellence. In that decade, as HRworks has become an innovative recruitment leader by providing a strategic approach to talent acquisition, the recruitment industry has changed dramatically. In comparing recruitment ' Then ' and ' Now ' in the accompanying chart, the two columns seem to represent very dissimilar practices.

For instance, ' cut and paste ' has a completely different meaning now than it did a decade ago. If you walked into a recruitment firm in 1998, you may have found recruiters literally using scissors and glue to format résumés. An "Applicant Tracking System (ATS)" consisted of a filing folder in a recruiter's desk. Now, these and many other recruitment processes are enabled through technological advancements, resulting in quicker, more efficient and more successful recruitment.

Ten years ago, job openings were physically posted on bulletin boards on a wall near the break room, or advertised in newspaper classified sections. Résumés were faxed to recruiters or mailed to P.O. boxes, and interviews were almost exclusively completed face-to-face.

Today, the Internet has become a principal means of recruitment communications, a primary reason for recruitment's dramatic evolution and the exponential expansion in the pool of potential candidates. Rather than building networks exclusively through face-to-face interactions, recruiters now network through Web sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo.

Technology has provided a wealth of new information, prompting important, federally-mandated data and recordkeeping requirements. Government agencies regulating recruitment used to focus primarily on hiring decisions. Now the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has moved up the recruitment funnel to consider the pool of qualified candidates. Ten years ago, recruitment was much less structured and recruiters searched for candidates without the same level of accountability. Even discrimination was simpler to understand then, but today's oversight has evolved into managing concerns of systemic discrimination. Basic qualifications, search strings and data management techniques are common terms for recruiters today as they document their searches and track valuable data to comply with federal regulations.

One of the most significant changes is Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), a common term now that was unheard of a decade ago. Many large organizations did not have internal recruitment teams at that time. Instead, they often used industry-specific boutique recruitment firms. Over the last 10 years, companies have built internal recruitment teams while augmenting their staffing needs with RPO firms. The term 'RPO' encompasses many different things - it can refer to a specific portion of or even the entire hiring process. However, all aspects of RPO are process-driven, scalable and a dramatic departure from traditional contingent search.

The last decade has been revolutionary in the recruitment industry, as evidenced by the 10 biggest changes HRworks has witnessed in that time, shown in our "Then" and "Now" grid. Can you think of other significant changes in recruitment in the last decade? This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it   to send us your comments.

Certainly, the next decade of recruitment will be just as interesting, as organizations find new and better ways to compete for talent in an ever-shrinking and fragmented labor pool.