Andrew Wilkinson, chief executive of TMP Worldwide

WE need to be expert on what works now and what might work in the future. You now have to be innovative in this business to be successful. For example, we currently have an eye on the opportunities being opened up by the Second Life virtual world on the internet. We are also looking at a website on which companies offer a fee to people who successfully match people they know to jobs the companies want to fill. It turns everyone into a potential recruiter.

Should recruitment companies be nervous about an innovation like this? Everyone should be slightly nervous when everything is changing this fast. The next couple of years will tell whether everyone can keep up with the rate of change. I’m not sure that everyone in the marketplace is capable of adapting at the speed that is now required.

Robert Peasnell, chief executive of Barkers

IN the past, recruitment advertising suffered from poor planning and poor methods of measuring its effectiveness.

Today there is much more marketing and much more research into the motivation of people we want to recruit and into why employees stay with a company and why they leave. Communication with potential and existing employees is increasingly important.

So we see ourselves linked not just with human resources now but with corporate communications and the client’s marketing teams.

The type of people we used to need in our business would have been expert in knowing which paper in, say, Stockport was the best to advertise in. Now we need proper consultancy skills and high intelligence. We need people who can confidently discuss the wider issues around the war for talent.

Nigel Monaghan, director of client development at Bernard Hodes

THIS whole area has become more marketing-focused and recruitment companies no longer deal with just HR but also with the client’s marketing teams. We always took a research-led approach and focused on bigger challenges such as employer branding and managing reputation. We continue to invest in that. We work across the employment life cycle through attraction, selection and retention of talent.

One of the biggest problems is that there is something inherently reactive in a lot of recruitment. It tends to be a distress purchase made because a client has to fill a post. It therefore carries time pressures that threaten the planning phase. We believe in doing research to understand the labour market dynamics within an employee group before a post needs to be filled.

Jamie Haskayne, Aia’s creative director

IT is very easy for clients to get caught up in why they would want someone to join their company rather than focus on the reasons people really have for joining. That’s where research, before a recruitment ad is ever placed, makes a difference.

We did some work for a big retailer whose image is very high energy and entrepreneurial. It is always bringing new products to the market. Senior people in the company thought this was what attracted employees to the company.

In fact, when we spoke to their people in customer services, we discovered that the main attraction of the company for them wasn’t its dynamism and energy but the stability and security of employment it offered.

This is the aspect of the employer brand that ought to be used to recruit customer services staff.

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