During her presentation, in which she discussed where the role of recruiters began and ended, Vikki Gartside, head of resourcing at Asda, said: “We are the person they know best in the organisation. Isn’t it our job to help coach them in and give them tips on success? If they land well, that will refect well on us.”

And she continued: “Typically, we face out, and training and development face in.” But, she suggested, how perfect it would be if recruiters could use what they found out about candidates’ strengths and weaknesses during the recruitment process and fed this knowledge of “the gaps” into the successful candidate’s training and development.

Gartside argued that there was a strong business case that recruiters should extend their role into other aspects of the employee life cycle too, such as succession planning and job design.

“So often in organisations, someone will come in and say ’We have merged two departments and now we’re looking for a head, but we know you are never going to find that on the external market’.

“This sort of thing happens all the time, but if we had been involved earlier, we could have had some influence on that debate.”