The online recruitment sector is increasingly fragmented and an entire flip of the traditional online recruiting model may be at hand.

These were just some of the issues highlighted at this year’s Online Recruitment — The Year Ahead event by the new director of Enhance Media, Giles Guest.

Enhance Media has staged the event for the past six years, with a record attendance this year of just under 300, a mixture of agency, consultancy and job board personnel, along with more than 140 employer delegates.

Guest told Recruiter that he put the attendance down to a number of factors, including a growing desire for online recruitment knowledge from employers looking to in-source and reduce spend. “Interestingly, this is both from companies new to online recruitment and those who have used it for some time but now want to grow the channel and take the online medium more seriously,” he said.

Topics included the use of video in recruitment, with Luisa Mauro, creative solutions specialist for YouTube in the UK, showing some examples of how it can be used effectively. Among the examples was a fast-paced insider look at working for YouTube’s parent company, Google, and a video by The Guardian to recruit a telesales category manager.

While less polished in terms of production than Google’s showcase, the latter was commended by Mauro for its direct, friendly and real approach, a large part of which was due to it being fronted by the tele sales manager at Guardian Recruitment Solutions. Mauro also reminded recruiters why they must sit up and take notice of video: online video advertising is predicted to grow by 49% between now and 2012, and 1.2bn minutes of video are watched online every month.

The Facebook presentation was eagerly awaited with Josh Smith, head of inside sales, explaining how the social networking site can be used to target recruitment messages.

The most pertinent example was from a company wanting to reach web developers/ designers aged 18 and older in Manchester and Stockport. Its message attracted 103 people to the application form, seven of whom went on to fill it out. The company made two hires — at a total cost of £30.

While information on the technology and tools being discussed was well received, there is nothing like user comment to put it into context. Tim Forster, UK head of experienced recruitment at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), showed how the company uses blogs written by those who work at the company to engage with talent. It has found that the blogs are three times as “sticky” as the PwC careers site as a whole. Since October, PwC has seen an increase in direct traffic and referred traffic from PwC blog websites to its careers website.

From the public sector, Janet Berry, recruitment strategy manager of Bracknell Forest Council, gave an account of how the council is using sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr (linked back to its career pages) to attract Generation Y and in so doing addresses issues such as age diversity.

Clearly, councils don’t feature in the top 10 cool places to work but Berry is attempting to change preconceptions. However, she was open about the hurdles still faced, some of which come from inside, such as that she is prevented from extracting maximum value from Facebook via staff because access to the social networking site is denied within the council.

While Guest’s own presentation came in the middle of the event, some of his comments served as thoughtprovoking postscripts to the day. His picture of the fragmented market showed the long tail of the internet made up of thousands of small niches and specialist job boards.

He illustrated the value of this long tail by citing a client who had filled a position in the highly specialised hydrography sector (the investigation of sea and bodies of water) via the Hydrography Society’s website.

He also suggested that one upshot of the fragmentation could be that the generalist sites move to become more like aggregators sites and the verticals move in the direction of niche.

Guest, who founded the specialist recruitment web development company 4MAT (which he sold to the Silicon Valley group in 2005), also put forward the idea that we could see a move from the current reactive online recruitment model of posting-a-job to proactively finding candidates.

So for employers the talent pool could become the new focus for all recruitment and, for the job boards, the CV database becomes the future. His presentation highlighted that some recruiters could be left behind. Talking after with Recruiter, he said there was definitely a place for good recruitment agencies “who could truly consult and were talented at using the internet”.

But he adds: “However, those whose online understanding is little better than their clients are under great threat from internet direct resourcing.”