i don't know about the rest of you but i am sick to death(pun intended) of all the self appointed thought leaders, gurus and myopic purveyors of the visions of the future of recruiting being predicated on something being dead.  The smell of decomp has hardly ever been part of my experience in  this business.

Yes, things evolve and change.  New things are added all the time but it's my take that if your vision of the future means that the recruiting agency business wil die, internal recruiters will die, job boards are dead, resumes are dead, interviews are dead and everything except what you came up with over a bottle of something or lunch with your idiot followers engaging in mental masturbation, you are too damn focused on things dying to make your philosophy work.  Elvis may be dead and you don't feel so good yourself but trust me you can remodel a house without tearing out the foundation.

To wax sophmoric for a minute, let's take the wheel.  It didn't die guru.  Somebody took the first one made of stone with a few chucks out of it that made it a slow slog and rounded it a bit.  Then somebody put wood on it, then somebody figured out if it had spokes instead a solid chunk of something it would be lighter, move faster, be easier to fix, then we put rubber on it and on and on.  We don't have stone wheels anymore but the wheel didn't die, it evolved.

In the world of blogging all one has to do is flop something out there saying that what someone else does for a living, or how they do it, is dead or dying.  Voila they get lots of comments from kookaid drinking followers and a contingent of pissed off people.  It's my take that a real thought leader has enough vision and experience in an industry not to reinvent the wheel then declare everything but their latest brain fart as dead or dying. 

 in my opinion, after watching the so called "thought leaders" come and go for over three decades in this industry, real thought leaders don't call themselves one.  Other people do.  Real thought leaders don't have to declare everything dead or dying.  They have the insight to take what is ,add what is happening and suggest what could happen if we added this process or changed what wasn't working.  Thought leaders evolve along with their thoughts being something that give other people an idea of their own as to how to add something to their business or process.

I think the self proclaimed thought leaders can be identified by their self promotion and their wallowing around in glee ,describing anyone who agrees with them as being posessed with superior intellect and those who don't as naysayers, dinosaurs or slow thinkers at best.  Here is a flash mob moment for you pal, some of us have survived , repeat survived and prospered in this industry for about three times longer than you have.  So before you throw the baby out with the bathwater or think your latest idea came to you as a vision from God that will cause a plague to wipe out all that went before you.  Take a look around ,recruiters have been evovling for decades before your brain fart and nobody died to make it happen.

My suggestion is that change happens, kids, industries, people grow up, evolve, add new things to get better and more productive.  If your vision includes everything dying to make it happen it's not a vision ,it's destruction of common sense, learning and enhancing.  Case in point, people found out about jobs in the mist of history by someone on a horse riding in and telling them that the rancher in the next county needed a cowbody.  I think that might have been called networking or a personal referral.  So dear thought leader if your brain fart gave you the idea that networking is the wave of the future and everything else is dead or dying ..you missed something in the last 100 years.  The evolution of networking is pretty easy to follow.

What say you?  Is the smell of decomp the only thing that stirs you to think?