I've been involved with International Souring for about six years now. In my virtual travels to places like Australia, India, China, South Africa, Germany, Eastern Europe, and of course Canada and the UK (and dozens of places in between) I've seen that things work very differently "over there." From Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, each region has a unique set of cultural and technological challenges which need to be addressed differently. Highlighting this is one of the principal reasons why I chose to speak at Onrec this year. Though the Internet has no borders, to me International Sourcing is the last great fronteer in Recruiting. As technology matures all over the world, so will the use of Internet methods accross borders. Soon many world regions will catch up, or maybe even exceed us, in their sourcing powers.
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7 _0 C7 d: `9 q" y) ]) R8 q4 r/ sAt Microsoft I work with an amazing group of people, some of them focused solely on International Recruiting efforts. Over the last few months I've been lucky to be able to spend some time working with one such "Global Citizen" located in Ireland, Declan Fitzgerald. His creativity in leveraging sourcing to solve some of his European recruiting challenges and gigantic goals really stands out. During a recent exchange of ideas he shared with me a "story" he wrote when inspired by the book "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century." His story really struck a cord - maybe because I'm a big "Hard SciFi" fan or maybe just because it made so much sense. I asked Declan if he wouldn't mind me sharing it with the rest of the world, and he agreed. So, dear rest-of-the-world, here in all its glory I present to you..

THE RECRUITER AS WE KNOW IS A WALKIN' FOSSIL!' ?8 c5 y; k" k4 i" v
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My generation is the last of a dieing race. Recruiters as we know them will be extinct very soon. Maybe 30 years! Caput.....boom....gone, or should I say transformed into some kind of 1/4 man 3/4 computer grotesque humanoid. Recruitment will be an end to end automated process. XML is changing the way the world interoperates. As groups like Oasis, RosettaNet and The Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C)  try to mediate the peace and wrestle the trenchantly vested subjective proprietary focuses away from the 20 stone A-pex Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Oracle, SAP's of the world, they usher in a new age of shared information. System to system business will flourish. Call it what you will - I call it S2S; not sure if that acronym exists already but if it doesn't -it should!!! With the publishing of the recent XML Resume format back in August of last year we've come one big step further to realising this: http://ns.hr-xml.org/2_3/HR-XML-2_3/SEP/Resume.html .I've been nattering on about this for a while. I even wrote a brief article about it 4 years ago which was published on our domestic business paper, Sunday Business Post, on Monster and also on the Irish HR magazine called People Focus. You can read it here: http://hr.monster.ie/articles/xml/print/. However, not all recruitment will be automated. It will be piecemeal. It will be by osmosis. Like most revolutions it's an evolution. The fluffy-bunny-cuchie-wuchy- hold your hand-look them-in-the-eye interview will always exist. An eye ball staring at an eye ball (let's call it i2i. It will be around for a long time, it needs a name too). It's the quintessential screening differentiator. The point being though, staring us in the eye is we should stay ahead of the creative curve to constantly reinvent our souring, screening and closing techniques to ensure we can connect to talent niches as effectively as possible.
& n6 a+ ]$ ]& U What we will see in a super-flat recruitment model is a very carefully laid out schematic which breaks down each segment of a candidates skill-set and each section of the screening process and probably also all the semantics involved in offering and closing positions to a granular, infinitesimal, scalpel level. Ultra precise screening will exist ( just look at the XML resume and you'll see what I mean). A lot of this may happen with a few simple clicks of a button. And who knows even one day with one magical click. Someday there may be ubiquitous, universal agreement on what this schematic should look like. It may be different for individual job categories and even individual jobs but in my opinion due to the cost savings, time savings and increase in quality, companies will come round, set their subjectivity aside and make this happen. If companies don't do it job seekers will do it.  XML can make this possible in conjunction with the merging of RSS feeds, Wi-Fi transmissions,  and God knows what else is around the corner.etc. It's hard to explain the way I see it happening. I reckon it might look a little like this, let me paint a scene, it's easier: