Shaping Ireland's Future - Does the Irish Recruitment Industry have a part to play?

Today I took some time out to study Chris Horn's (CEO of Iona) excellent presentation "Shaping Ireland's Future - Communication for a Smart Economy" that he posted on his blog this Saturday. You can find it here. It's an excellent report and one of the things that caught my eye was on slide 24 bullet point 2 he calls out as one of the country's basic challenges as the "need to attract overseas innovators to add to our own". I couldn't agree more. Not only do we need to grow, foster and cultivate our own indigenous innovators but we also need to be able to find the best talent the world has to offer and bring them to these shores. I believe the Irish HR and Recrutiment industry has its part to play in this particular piece of the economic rebuilding jigsaw. We need to learn how to raise the level of recruitment sophistication in particular so that we can identify where talent globally exists. It is the "identification" and "sourcing" of this talent that I think we can have a tangible impact in as an industry. By creating and supporting a culture of recruitment innovation we can try improve ourselves. Just as Google have Google Labs and Microsoft have Live Labs we should have our own "recruitment labs" in Ireland to fine tune our skills, get better at what we do as a collective, and help bring innovators and talent to this country not just to take jobs which we are predominately focused on but also to create jobs. I sometimes wonder with the recent TCD and UCD R&D Innovation Academy (launched last March) do they have a centre of sourcing excellence in their HR departments focused on these issues. Likewise what is the capability of the enterprise Ireland or the department of enterprise and trade to do likewise. I hope we have people in both "experimenting" with technology to understand how best to leverage it to help us source Phd students in gaming, bi-technology, green technology, ecetra. Likewise have any of our employment related government bodies developed their social media recruitment strategy to let the world know we want to tell them about some of the excellent innovation that is already taken place using the latest and most leading edge channels and tools available. -?-