An interesting look at the history of the recruitment industry

Recruitment began with the military and dates back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. However, the birth of the modern contracting industry did not take place until the 1940s as a result of World War II. Employment agencies began advertising workers who were not required to do military service in an effort to fill the void in the workplace left by those who were called up for service. The end of the war caused an influx of workers returning from the military, many with new skills that could be applied to the burgeoning field of technology. Headhunting companies became popular in response to the growing workforce. Headhunting agencies served job seekers until the strong economy of the 1970s led to a shift from working for the employee to working for the employer. Enjoying a period of relative prosperity and growth, large corporations began to outsource their recruiting efforts to recruiting firms. Due to IRS employment taxes, recruiters only made placements for full-time executive positions.

The headhunting industry continued to operate this way until labor laws began to change and the line between employees and independent contractors blurred. In 1986, Congress eliminated the safe harbor for certain technical workers, which affected how engineers, draftsmen, systems analysts, designers, computer programmers, and other professionals in similar lines of work were classified. The Revenue Act of 1978 had previously allowed employers to appeal an employee’s reclassification if the industry had classified certain types of workers as independent contractors in the past. However, this was changed by the 1986 amendment by preventing employers from appealing reclassification if the employee had been placed by a third party agency.

In response, corporations simply began doing what the IRS had accused them of failing to do in the first place. Large companies began to reclassify all of their employees, changing their status from 10-99 to W-2. As web-based businesses and technology began to flourish with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, it cleared the way for recruiters to place programmers, systems analysts, designers, draftsmen, computer programmers, and more. engineers, as well as executive and senior-level positions for the hundreds of start-ups and startups.

By the 1990s, headhunting had begun to take on new forms, adopting a variety of buzz names and specialized strategies, such as “synthetic” recruiting, “broadband” staffing, “convergent” recruiting strategies, and so on. as something that became known as MARS, or “Multidisciplinary Advanced Personnel Rapid Management.” At the height of the Internet boom, companies were desperate for staffing solutions that would help meet the demands of the growing economy and seemingly endless supply of wealth.

Unfortunately, the economic downturn has been hard on the recruiting industry. Not only are unemployment rates high, but the companies that are hiring often make an effort to save money by doing their own staffing and human resource management. However, it can be predicted that when the economy starts to recover, the recruitment business will once again be in high demand.