Recession? Where?

Business is really booming at the moment, but if you listen to the media, doom and gloom is everywhere. There are certainly pockets, the stock market, the real estate market, mortgages (I guess that's a good size chunk isn't it?), but the tech sector seems to me to be still motoring along.

I am getting occasional comments recently from tech people that things are "slow". Seems they aren't feeling the love from recruiters and hiring firms like they have been the last couple years.

ROI currently has more openings than ever, so it almost seems like a bit of a disconnect.

It's funny; people have a love/hate relationship with the recruiting industry sometimes - they want to be called and sought after, but can get annoyed sometimes, and particularly by the wrong recruiters.

On the other hand, when things slow down, they start to wonder why the calls aren't coming in any more.

I get questions from people sometimes about how things are going, what I see happening in the industry as a whole. I pick up a lot of intel talking to people, but I always caveat my responses this way: ROI is small. Our piece of the universe is not that large, and what we see may or may not be representative of the whole. Recruiting is like real estate, where they say "all real estate markets are local"; recruiting tends to be ""local"" in the sense that a particular firm or recruiter's business (which may not be geographically focused) will represent just a small slice of what's going on.

It's not unusual at all for two more or less similar firms in a region to be seeing different results, or even 2 comparable recruiters in the same firm.

Things haven't tanked yet, but there are some signs around.

Going Global

The world is such today that going global no longer has to even be part of an organization's strategic plan, it can, and will happen without even trying.

I get approached every month by international contacts seeking to form relationships and do business. Numerous RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) companies, mainly from India, have sought out ROI.

I've communicated with numerous overseas candidates, vendors and recruiters. Now ROI has it's first non-US client. Today we held our first in person interview overseas, between a client and candidate based in Canada, both of whom happened to be in London at the time.

Where are you looking for your next business opportunity?