Dorothy Beach, MBA CIR PHR got me think­ing. She posted a ques­tion on the dis­cus­sion board of the LinkedIn Social Media Recruit­ing Group ask­ing for opin­ions on the effect of social media on recruit­ing in the far future, 5–20 years down the vir­tual high­way. My mind imme­di­ately took a jour­ney to Wish List Lane and Tech­nol­ogy Square. If you repeat some­thing enough times and really believe it that makes it real­ity, right?

In my vul­canesque way of think­ing, most every­one on Earth will be dig­i­tally lit­er­ate and have their own domain which will seam­lessly be linked to the var­i­ous net­works they choose to par­tic­i­pate in. Job seek­ers and pas­sive can­di­dates  open to oppor­tu­ni­ties will be able to open their net­works to can­di­date searches so they can be found. Job seek­ers will no longer need to proac­tively apply to openings.

Com­pa­nies will con­duct searches not job seek­ers. Recruiters will be con­sul­tants to com­pa­nies hir­ing and per­form more of a job pro­file / com­pany fit iden­ti­fi­ca­tion role, write the job key­words and para­me­ters and set up the new­fan­gled ATS which will be on a cloud. Soft­ware will be coded to meet the require­ments of highly spe­cial­ized queries and it will crawl to find can­di­dates pro­files base on the dis­tance you wish to search and import them into your data­base where you will be able to fur­ther refine your search. Boolean strings will be old fash­ioned and sys­tems will be user intu­itive and friendly.

Recruiters will nar­row the can­di­date pool by refin­ing matches and con­duct­ing 1st vir­tual screen­ings, rec­om­mend the top 3 can­di­dates to hir­ing man­agers, co-conduct the inter­views and assist in the deci­sion mak­ing ad place­ment process. Recruiters, in their expanded con­sul­tant role may see new hires through their first 3 months tak­ing an active role in the new onboard­ing process.

What’s your vision?