Great conversation starter and we are most definitely at a critical inflection point in the evolution of the search business. I have a million ideas on this subject but in an effort to be brief will make just one comment.

The simple outlook is that companies believe that sourcing talent with aggregate web technologies parallels what mainstream advertisers do and pull their target audience/ candidate pools to their company and in the process fill jobs. Yes this technology casts a wide net, and yes they will get a higher # of resume responses for each posting due to added exposure. However I am very speculative as to if these “cost effective approaches” have 1) true holistic measurable ROI – and not the cop out formula of “we didn’t need a search firm therefore saved yada yada yada… AND 2) truly attract A players. Nonetheless this will be something we will need to combat to elevate our real value as recruiters. I think something the search world will need to become great at is strategically measuring ROI for each client on the candidates we bring to the table/place versus those they source on their own through ‘web magic’. This will take some time to implement though, but in this new HR movement of “technology will save us!”- we need HARD evidence and #s to show value – time to put up or shut up.