First in the chute is Amitai Givertz.

We had lunch with Ami in a prototypical Manhattan diner the first time we physically met him. We'd been hearing from and about him while suffering the lash of his pen over the past year or so. Ami is the single most provocative and infectious of the new voices that have emerged in the blogging fury that has taken center stage in the industry. It felt like a gathering of old Bolsheviks plotting the overthrow of anything that came up. We were completely unprepared to like him so much.

Here are Ami's takes on the most important things in 2006. He' asks and wrestles with tough questions on his blog, Recruitomatic

• Talent Wars: "Hype-or-Inflation?"
  While some argued the so-called "war for talent" in the U.S. is a cynical marketing ploy being perpetuated by industry hustlers, anecdotal evidence provided by hiring managers suggests that not only does a crisis exist but it is a problem of global proportions. In 2006 we continued to count the dead and bayonet the wounded, many paying more for talent-in-short-supply, waiting longer to fill jobs for skilled workers.
   

• Business Matters: Kenexa Moves Up the Food ChaiN
  As the pie grows, so do the appetites of aspiring end-to-end providers. In a year that saw some interesting acquisitions, Kenexa seemed to be the most selective in its pickings. Plumping up on WebHire, Knowledge Workers, Gantz Wiley Research, BrassRing and Psychometric Services Limited, Kenexa looks ever more delicious, reporting revenue of $24.7 million in Q2 06, an increase of 54% over the same period last year. Sweet.
   

• Help-wanted: Gimme a Posting, Daggit!
  Requisition-driven consumerism among recruiters and job seekers remains a largely unchanged behavior, befuddling some who would retool recruitment advertising from an on-demand, media-driven process to a more sustained, targeted form of attraction. While RSS, resume tagging, vertical search, SEO all promised something wonderful, in 2006 the majority of would-be beneficiaries either didn't get it or still don't care.
   

• HR Consulting: A Cottage Industry
  A few high-profile practitioners took an entrepreneurial turn in 2006, going solo. It seems there is growing demand for "shirt-sleeve" subject matter experts, particularly those who – in relative terms – give away their know-how for practically nothing.  On the speaker circuit too, it seems their value – not to be underestimated – comes at little more than the price of room and board.
   

• Big Brother: Who, What Is An Applicant?
  As federal contractors scurried around to make sure they were in compliance with the OFCCP's Definition of an Internet Applicant – implementing systems for record keeping, readying for the dreaded audit – some realized that they may have failed to meet more widely accepted standards of best-practice recruiting. As the OFCCP ruling assumed that passive candidates, private talent pools and JIT recruiting don't exist, that was a great relief to many.
   

• Publishing: Old Media, Job Boards. On Again, Off Again.
  Publishers Gannett and the Tribune Group increased their stakes in CareerBuilder and Monster jumped into bed with 43 newspapers, HotJobs adding 167 news titles to its growing harem of newsprint partners. The help-wanted classifieds are projected to be barren by 2020 – largely thanks to the job board triumvirate – raising the question if these are more marriages of convenience than a fatal attraction between oligopolies. Now, with NewsCorp getting cozy alongside SimplyHired, like the NY Times and Indeed.com before it, it won't be long before postings become bastard progeny – step-children at best – second in-line to the resumes.
   

• Social Networking: Coming of Age
  The Augmented Social Network – tweaked slightly to accommodate monetization and shareholder value, once the Achilles heel of an otherwise altruistic vision – bloomed in 2006. LinkedIn, Spoke, Ryze, MySpace and Facebook transcended the proliferation of other sites providing real value to recruiters on the hunt for contacts, talent. Jobster, quick to realize the potential of this new-age phenomenon, raised gobs of cash, industry eyebrows and high expectations.
   

• Human Capital: What's In Your Wallet?
  As recruiting became tougher and tougher to pull-off as a mostly transaction-based, process-driven series of chronological events, vendors cashed-in with assorted "turnkey" solutions. Many employers – with an a eye on sustainable competitive advantage – are coming to realize that unlocking their potential requires that they have the right combination/code for workforce planning, profiling, branding, sourcing, screening, assessment, selection, onboarding, engagement, retention, succession planning, technology, metrics and so on – not a login for this, or a password for that.  2006 will be remembered then for a few ah-ha moments long after than the specialty-vendors' cha-ching has cha-chung.
   

•  Recruiting Blogs: Imminent Domain
  Jobster acquired Recruiting.com, the center of gravity for a fast-growing number of recruiting blogs. With no clear business rationale or strategy other than "i love me some disruptor," Recruiting.com went from community blog portal to content black hole.  Old-timers have sought to bring back some semblance of the way things were: RecruitingBloggers and The Day in Recruiting combine what we miss most in Recruiting.com – a bloggers blog and a good live feed – RecruitingFly enabling search. Oh, well. That's progress, the price we pay for link-love.
   

• Search: Return of the Body Snatchers
  Even as social networking, job board jibber jabber, Web 2.0 upstarts and vendor vim gobbled up the headlines, in 2006 Executive Search quietly continued to consolidate its position as an industry staple, a stalwart player. When making sense of it all makes no sense at all – or push comes to shove on an impossible req. – call a third-party recruiter, why not? It's only money.

John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.
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