First let me start off with a congratulations to RecruitingBlogs for hitting the 20K member mark! I don't have a crystal ball but I do have hopes & dreams as well as opinions so I will attempt to share them with you in this post.

My future in recruiting is something that I think about all the time. Since joining this industry 14 years ago it has been an amazing ride. What's a guy that has hired and trained over 1000 recruiters, open up offices all over the country, been a speaker at nearly every recruiting & staffing industry conference, and helped to place some 15,000 candidates into new positions got left to do here? Well my answer is simple, I've got a lot left to do. For me the recruiting is a wonderful way to change the world. Now my role is to impact the industry in a way the can help others for years to come. My future in recruiting is bright. My future in recruiting is chock full of hiring and training recruiters, helping the industry to move in a positive direction, and helping candidates to find meaningful work so they can support their families and achieve their dreams.

There is so much technology out there and it is changing the way we work. The wave of the internet and email hit back in the mid 90's, then we moved into the era of the job board, and today we see ourselves in the midst of a social networking dynasty. I think the leading technology of the future will be the one that figures out how to integrate what we have so that we can utilize the power we have on our desktops and via the web. Wouldn't it be great if we could easily see all our contacts, and how our relationships match up across social networks, access multiple databases, automate the things we do all the time and increase our productivity.

I see the recruiting platform of the future building on a "best of breed" strategy to allow users to utilize not only the best software applications available but also to give us the opportunity "plug & play" with the tools of our choice. By allowing us to easily search multiple databases for matches or to automate the creation and to save complex searches that we need to customize and access all the time would be a dream come true. Some may say that we can do that today but the truth is that most of what you see out in the world is too proprietary and complex for the average user. Just like a device such as the iPhone gives us a cell phone, email, internet access, GPS, music, photos, video, etc,,, BTW it would be nice if they would add the ability for it to also act as my drivers license, credit card, ATM, proof of insurance and everything else I carry in my wallet, we need a recruiting tool that can bridge the gaps to all of the needed functionality for a recruiter regardless of their niche specialty or what kind of a computer they use be it Mac or PC. It should be as easy as adding a widget or plugging in an application.

What drives recruiting is people. What creates technology is people. What connects clients and candidates is people and what goes to work every day to deliver value to companies is people. People are the common bond. People are whet we spend 80% of all our revenue on and 80% of all our time trying to find or keep.

The problem is that the recruiters, clients, candidates and developers seem to always be across the table from each other. We need to toss the table out of the room, sit down and work together on how to enhance what we need. Share our goals and even our budgets. There is a major win out there for us and I plan to be a part of the solution.

My desire is to be a part of recruiting for as long as I can, to help as many recruiters as I can to be productive and to have part in putting as many people to work as possible so that we can all do what we really love to do which is to spend as much quality time as we can with our family and friends and doing the things we all love to do!

Happy Recruiting!

Craig Silverman

About Craig Silverman: Craig recently joined Albin Engineering (www.aesi.com), an innovative technology services and staffing solutions provider, in Santa Clara, CA as Partner and Vice President of Sales & Marketing. Prior to joining Albin Engineering, Craig was the EVP, Sales & Marketing for HireAbility.com from 2004 - 2008. From 2002-2004, he was the Senior Vice President for TMP/Hudson Global Resources (HHGP) where he was responsible for their $90M U.S. IT Services business. From 1996–2001, Craig was with Hall Kinion as Executive Vice President or Recruiting Services and CMO. He was successful in growing the Hall Kinion recruiting business from annual revenues of $30M to $296M while opening 40 new sales offices, and hiring 400 recruiters.