Coping With Unemployment

I spent today surrounded by recruiters – and I liked it. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d find myself typing, but it’s true. Or perhaps I should say TRU. I was at the TRU London recruitment unconference, along with my colleague Martin Couzins, who has already blogged about the event here.

The main theme running through the day, at least in the sessions or “tracks” I attended, was social media in its main manifestations (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and so on) and its impact on the recruitment industry.

The conversation was enriched by the presence of several influential recruiters and bloggers from the US, where the use of social media in recruitment is more advanced than in the UK, and from France and the Netherlands. There’s a list of track leaders here.

There was a strong view that the world of recruitment is about to be turned upside down for a second time in a decade, this time by the exponential growth of social media. This revolution has the potential to be at least as disruptive as the advent of the internet job board 10 years or so ago, which saw employers increasingly switching from print to online advertising and job hunters flocking to the internet to find their next job.

The disruptive potential of social media to what I suppose we must now call the “traditional” web-based recruitment model is clearly illustrated by the run-away success of LinkedIn.

This led one recruiter to ask this morning whether in 10 years’ time job boards will have totally disappeared, as there will be no need for them in a world where there are millions of CVs or profiles available for recruiters to search online. Others disagreed. One even suggested that the whole internet could now be seen as one giant job board – although in a way I think that is simply a melodramatic way of saying that traditional job boards’ days are numbered.

Personally, I tend to agree with some of the more nuanced assessments, suggesting that the next decade will see a more fragmented picture, with job boards and even print publications continuing to play a role alongside social media, with the precise weight depending on the characteristics of different job markets and sectors. That said, social media looks set to be the main growth area for recruitment – and everyone involved in the industry at any level would be well advised to prepare for that.

The event continues tomorrow. Unfortunately I can’t be there, but I will be following its lively Twitter stream via the hashtag #trulondon.