The skills shortage "doesn't exist" and is just "a convenient myth" that helps recruiters sell their services, the Recruiter Wealth Forum in London heard.

Skills shortages were one of the "big sector trends" examined by Albert Ellis, chief executive officer of Harvey Nash, as he considered whether investing in the recruitment industry was a compelling proposition.

Ellis said that far from their being a skills shortage, recruiters needed to look at things "in a different way". From a global perspective, he argued the industry looked rather different. China and Asia were the drivers of growth, he said. "And with a billion people under the age of 30, there is more human talent in the world than ever before."

Ellis said that with Vietnam, for example, producing four times more graduates compared to the UK, the challenge for recruiters was "to harvest talent [from Vietnam] rather than to compete with it".

But Ellis said that UK recruiters were in a strong position. The UK 'brand' is "incredible", he said, with London in particular a great magnet for talented people.

Ellis argued that if recruiters were to prosper they needed to embrace the wider changes going on in society. One major challenge was 'Generation Y' (29 years and under) and another was older people. "We in recruitment are right in the middle of all of this," Ellis said.

Ellis admitted that in the 2000 downturn he had thought it was "all over" for the industry. But today he was more optimistic. "It's only just begun," he said.