To me, a recruiter today is 'the family doctor ' who existed in India, about 3 decades ago. No matter what the illness, we had a doctor uncle or aunt, who was very familiar with the family, the lifestyle, the generic diseases they suffered from -and so often even talked us out of being sick, just being around!!

Then came the age of specialist docs, who began by setting up a nursing home in the neighborhood- having a polyclinic inviting some of the other colleagues to complement the skills and treat 'out patients'- but soon ran into problems relating to 'technological obsolescence' and infrastructure bandwidth. Of course, the 21st century has seen the growth of corporate hospitals, and keeping in sync with the outsourcing theme-even medical tourism and telemedicine are growing by leaps and bounds.

Are we going to see a similar evolution in the transformation of the recruiter?

Traditionally, we had recruiters expanding by having multiple locations across the country. In the Indian recruitment world, we have seen the biggies eg ABC, MaFoi, Peopleone- have all gone to become ' global corporate' by being part of world wide firms-there are a whole lot of others being wooed by VC firms and PE firms with a lot of passion-and a lot of tier 2 and tier3 firms thinking of forming alliances to stay abreast/ get to the next level & continue to add value!

I am tempted to draw parallels from the consulting, accounting, or legal firms -which have been part of a more matured industries...and predict, there is room for a lot of worldwide networks of small recruiter firms who would retain their own personal identity, strength of their networking and relationship management skills, and have the 'localised' yet 'personalised human touch' that manage 'intimate aspirations of career growth'-which no software or large firm can replace!!

Technology has been helping compress time, distance, efficiencies and to use a ciche'- geography is becoming history!!