I am sat, laptop out, on a train heading from Manchester to Reading. I am clearing out the non-urgent emails of the last couple of days. As I open and scan an email from random recruiter at equally random company, I feel as though I have read these words 10,000 times: ’I HAVE!’

This generic ’spamming’ dressed up as marketing or candidate introductions hits my inbox literally hundreds of times in a week. I usually ignore these emails and fire them off to Deleted Items, possibly spam-blocking the sender if I recognise the name from a previously ignored email - although I don’t usually get so emotionally attached to a name that I would remember it. The text content carries the usual (Recruitment 1.0.1) statements: ’We work differently to other agencies’; ’we are a “consultancy” ’; ’deep understanding of your requirements’; ’biggest/best/fastest/sexiest (delete as appropriate) database’. Plus many, many, many more.

On this occasion, possibly due to being stationary outside Birmingham for the last half hour, I decide to respond. I take on and attack all the ’usual statements’ and launch a full-on assault at the quality of this kind of approach. I move the cursor to the send button. I then stop. I delete the text and send the mail simply saying ’CALL ME’.

My sudden change in decision was down to a thought that suddenly entered my head: ’Am I blaming them unfairly? Have we as corporate recruiters and HR professionals taken too much of the consultancy out of ’recruitment consultants’?

The use of technology in recruitment is obviously just a part of our evolution but how the technology is used (or misused) is what I struggle with; it is being used as the steering force instead of the supporting role. We have entered Generation Mouse-clicker in recruitment.

I went ’in-house’ seven years ago and immediately jumped on the bandwagon. I bought in to the idea that online candidate management systems were the most seamless way to co-ordinate recruitment activity. Generic recruitment email addresses ([email protected] etc) made CV filtering easier to manage. Spamming out job descriptions to the PSL or chosen suppliers meant no lengthy calls explaining requirements (and answering sometimes idiotic questions) over and over again. You get the idea…

All of these statements are absolutely true and provide the benefits I mention, which in the role I do today are invaluable and that I can’t deny. But has this pushed recruiters down the wrong road to success?

Recruiters have taken this push further than we asked for by going online altogether. And we don’t help. I sometimes wonder whether some recruitment managers consider it a success if they can go a whole year without actually speaking to a recruiter. Those recruiters that still do canvass call me are generally the ones that pre-date the use of so much technology. In short, recruiters’ evolution has weakened the species, becoming anonymous marketers that stumble on opportunity instead of searching it out with intelligent and productive calls that genuinely develop their network. Recruiters, it’s time to regress.

In 2010 I plan to do my bit for encouraging changing habits. I will talk to more recruiters, take more of their calls and push them off their email. I will probably still say ’no thanks’, but let’s not get me started on the quality of objection handling these days… Oh, and in case you were wondering - no, he didn’t call me.

Kevin Blair is senior recruitment manager EMEA at Oracle