"I'm a recruiter, where's the disruption?"

Your life as a recruiter hasn't changed much since you started...

You know that someone somewhere is placing futurists into Mars exploration programmes but it isn’t you. You're reading about robo-advisors, artificial intelligence, driverless cars, smart homes and the new digital economy. It sounds as though everything is getting disrupted and your job is about to become redundant....or is it?

Relax! Your job is safe. That is as long as you are prepared to do your job. The successful recruitment agencies of now are "an inch wide, a mile deep" - a magnet for the great candidates that your clients are crying out for. The magnetic bit is you - the expert, knowledgeable, proactive recruiter.

Oh and by the way you'll have to save your relaxing for Christmas time.

Longer term ask yourself whether it will be you filling jobs or Robbie Robot. Now some recruiters reading this will answer that it will be Robbie Robot...and in their case it probably will be. Perhaps a few employers will even be egging Robbie Robot on.

For the rest of us we're building real, valuable relationships. And that's very different to just making calls ("smiling and dialing") - i don't have a relationship with the phone salesman that calls me from Vodafone but he still calls. Of course real relationships span multiple mediums.

Right now our clients are investing in new technologies (and love the words smart, digital, disruptive) that will ultimately change their world and by association ours. They are figuring out how to evolve. Some organisations won’t make the transition (think Nokia, Kodak) and that includes recruitment agencies too.

The question of course is whether your business will make it and how you can tell. Will you fall victim to an Uber moment or has the leadership plotted a clever path?

I think that our roles are to harness smart technology (and older technology where we have to) to reduce the cost, improve the quality and reduce the time our clients take to recruit. This requires skills that many individual recruiters don't possess (and thus Robbie Robot enters the fray).

As a trainee recruitment consultant you can’t be blamed for what you don’t know....but within reason your boss can.

There seem to be too many recruitment leaders following the mantra that they learn't in the 2000's while the world around them is changing. FAST. These recruitment agencies have a vision that extends to making money, finding a buyer and heading for the UK countryside (where broadband is yet to be rolled out). Developing YOU doesn't feature in their plan.

And thus your 5 years of hard work in your twenties may not translate into new opportunities within the new economy because your employer has limited your development.....times changed while you were busy making calls.

We all know that business models are changing fast. That's exciting as long as your career is in good hands. As we hear often "its not the most intelligent or strongest that survive but those most adaptable to change". We hear it a lot because its true.

So what does this evolution look like in your company?

Imagine being one of those minicab drivers who's world was turned upside down overnight by an upstart called Uber that their boss had never heard of. The disruption is here, so for us lets embrace it, keep evolving and accept that some recruitment companies won't make it.

Responsible leaders have a plan to ensure that their business isn't one of the losers. I really want to be one of those leaders.