Economic Slowdown - Is it really a bad thing?

According to the news, Trinity Mirror Group, who publish five national newspapers and many regional titles, are reporting a drop in advertising spend, including an 8% drop in recruitment advertising. The fact that the general reduction is across most sectors appears to point to economic slowdown as the cause.

But is economic slowdown the reason behind recruitment advertising being 8% off? Or is this also a sign our industry is reducing it's reliance on advertising for candidate sourcing and starting to more widely embrace alternatives such as Search Engine Marketing, Social Networks, Blogs and the many other Web 2.0 type solutions?

Probably if I had the time to do the research I could find evidence to back up both theories. The reality is probably that both are contributing factors. But this leads me to ask if a slowing of the economy is really a bad thing for our industry? OK, in the agency market it's not the most original question and not too many people will shed a tear if those agencies, that add little value to the process, disappear.

But what is the impact of a financial downturn to a corporate recruiter? This is a more difficult question to answer as, unlike agency recruiters, corporate recruiters didn't really exist during the last recession. So here goes with some educated guesses as to what might happen;

• Sadly some will lose their jobs. Unlike in the US, many companies here in dear old blighty, still don't understand the true value of a good corporate recruiter. So when the question is raised about how to save costs is asked and the suggestion is made to cut non core staff is made, our highly skilled corporate recruiter finds themselves seeking a more appreciative audience. Ironically, there will be companies that follow this course of action that then revert to using agencies for the recruitment they do do, often spending more than they have saved by cutting their internal capability!
• Some corporate recruiters will see an improvement in their golf handicaps. Less vacancies to fill, more candidates to fill them with, ain't life grand!
• However the enlightened ones will realise that even in a candidate rich environment, finding the best talent, who are the key to the ongoing success of ones company, is as much of a priority, maybe more so, than in a boom economy. However, with the haystack being larger than normal, finding the needle becomes more of a challenge.

So in our constant search for new and better ways to source, how do we filter out the interference that is Mr and Mrs Average? Measure our outcomes (Yes I know I'm in danger of being repetitive) But just because you are suddenly getting 50% more responses to you ad campaign, if we can prove that our successful hires are the ones you found for free on LinkedIn, we know where to devote more effort and our boss loves us because we are rationalising our recruitment spend during more challenging economic times.