Rise in the focus of India as a domestic market.
If you believed many commentators you'd think that India was solely a place to run operations to bring down cost. I think we'll see a softening of this view in 2006 as the Indian, probably middle-class, domestic consumer is ‘noticed' in the European and US press.

Businesses will increasingly view their presence in India as a way of exploring the fast-growing local market. Staffing needs will reflect this.

The rise in interest in the EU new entrants.
Companies in many European states will increasingly turn to the newer EU states to relieve their staffing needs. For some that will mean increased activity attracting the brightest to move to centres like London and Dublin, for others it will be attracting mid-skill and low-skilled labour to fill roles which are increasingly difficult to fill and the last set of firms will continue to develop centres in these countries as off-shoring centres.

The rise in the search engines.
2005 was certainly a year when vertical search came onto the horizon for many. I would counter that using a vertical search engine is still not seen as a prime strategy for many job searchers. 2006 will be a year where adoption becomes more widespread, though it'll remain at the early adopter phase at the end of the year unless one of the big engines makes a better move in this space.

Vertical search is also very much a US activity at the moment. Many of the firms are just not targeting the European or APAC markets. We'll probably see a few companies experiment in these markets.

Noise will continue to be an issue for the search engines. Most job seekers don't care how many jobs the engines have indexed but prize relevancy. Part of this is certainly exasperated by recruiters writing poor, none-differentiable job ads. Part of it is an issue of searching non-structured text.

The year of subscription
2006 will see more ATS providers offer RSS feeds instead of email job-agents. We'll probably RSS based search engines who'll take advantage of this trend. Think vertical Technorati as a model here, possibly with user-submission of feeds.

Someone, somewhere at sometime will build a better aggregator for job-ad feeds. It will be based on HR-XML developed data provided as a feed by the bigger ATS providers. The business model will be closer to a search engine than a job-board. From a candidate's perspective it will offer great advantages in terms of ability to make results relevant.

As the value of relationships increases, the central role of technology will decrease.
2006 will see more firms using physical events as a way of building deep candidate relationships. Think PWC Switzerland's Fasttrax as a model here. Company-specific job fairs will increasingly happen for larger employers. Technology here will be used as the enabler, but for the candidate it will not be a technology-led trend.

Employer branding will become more important.
My guess is that by 2010 employer branding will be the biggest issue in HR. It is inherently linked to engagement which in itself is related (though not 1:1) with retention. It is also reasonably easy to measure many engagement and retention. We'll see more efforts being made to internally promote the proposition and in the most forward-thinking firms HR policies being constructed that are designed to raise engagement, not deliver efficiency.

Recruitment marketing becomes more important on the back of this.
As a way of promoting the employment brand recruitment marketing should be key. Most recruiters, however, don't understand marketing. From an external perspective the marketing function will start to show an increased interest in recruitment marketing in many firms. If HR wants to continue to own this area it better bring marketing skills into the recruitment marketing functions and move activities away from individual recruiters

The most enlightened firms will start constructing work in a way that is appealing.
You'll know when your recruitment marketing team are well respected when they influence how work is done so as to make it more appealing to key markets externally.

Disclaimer, I'm a recruitment marketer so I probably would think this.

Alex Barnetts 2006 Techie Predictions:

My Eleven Techie / Web and One non-Techie 2006 Prediction(s)

1. 2006 will be tagtastic and a big year for OPML

2. Sructured blogging will do well but not as well as it'll do in 2007

3. My wife will start subscribing to websites and she won't know she's using RSS

4. The first killer apps emerge using RSS + SSE (before end of June)

5. Youtube will buzz right off the scale

6. A new even-more-major 'Social Software' player will emerge out of nowhere

7. Many more articles about attention data in the mainstream press like this one at the FT. Cries of 'I want my attention data!!' will be heard

8. Tim Berners-Lee is will consistently evangelise the Semantic Web - serious progress to be made this year

9. Microformats will ride the coattails of the Semantic Web's progress

10. Allofmp3.com will get noticed (it will this time, I nearly promise)

11. More distribution of more data. New business mantra: "No APIs, no business" (or "No REST for the wicked")
12. One non-tech prediction: Everyone will have heard of Hard-Fi by end of next year (or a lot of people outside of the UK at least). Bring back that Ska!

The January Issue of Future of Work Agenda is available from The Future Of Work. A Free Monthly Newsletter.

Feature Article: As The New Year Dawns
2005 included several events and global experiences that illustrate the need to think not only "outside the box," but indeed entirely outside our normal frames of reference. And the major "normal" psychological frame of reference we hang onto (often for dear life) is that change proceeds in a predictable, orderly, and even linear fashion. In contrast, the two of us believe the stage has been set for very significant disruptive, and very nonlinear, change in the way we work during 2006. (More)

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Jupiter Webinar Automated Bid Management: Tools for Search Marketers January 10, 2006 2:00pm EST, 11:00am PST Free More Info	The HR Directors Summit 2006 30-31 January 2006 Radisson Edwardian Heathrow
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