(April 15, 2005) - It's a huge marketplace. It's easy to forget how many different kinds of people are under our tent. From internal HR Recruiters to Staffing firms, from Recruitment Advertising vendors to sourcing experts, from RPOs (Recruitment Process Outsourcers) to vendors of Automated tools for tracking, assessing or actual recruiting, the industry is complex on the employment side.

It's equally chaotic on the job-hunter/employee side.

If people actually change jobs every four years (and we keep hearing that the number is falling) and a job change is worth 30% of the first year's wage (we think that's a good estimate), the the industry is worth 7.5% of total payroll (or gross Domestic Product). There are few industries of that size.

If you think a little harder and add in the costs of diversity, EEO enforcement and various onboarding activities, the value approaches 15%. The hiring of people (human capital acquisition) is an industry that forms the backbone of all other enterprises. The management and allocation of talent is the discriminating factor in most competitive circumstances.

The emergence of the new (.jobs) domain name provides us all with an opportunity to reconsider our value and place in the scheme of things. It's no small thing that the .jobs extension in one of the first new domain extensions. That is exactly correlated to our industry's underlying import. You can't have commercial entities (.com) without hiring (.jobs).

Sadly, the institutions of our industry are seriously shortsighted. Steve Levy said it pretty clearly, "With 500+ SHRM chapters in the US and only 12 EMA chapters, it is painfully clear what SHRM thinks of recruiting. Now this..." He was referring, of course, to the blatant anti-recruitment advertising agency, anti-staffing firm, anti-professional recruiting sentiment that everyone encounters in local SHRM chapters.

Newer organizations are no better. Complete vendor-centricity is not a way to remake the industry. It's a way to line the pockets of one well placed training provider while providing cover for some pretty flighty stuff.

From the center of the industry, you can see the potential.