Michael Porter said: “Strategy 101 is about choices: You can’t be all things to all people”.  

A great mentor once told me that a good niche strategy for a recruiting desk would be to focus in a territory.  He said: “know every person in a given domain within a specific geographic area.” 

I love this wisdom.  Being confident in saying “no” to certain opportunity outside of a niche keeps our world manageable.  

Enter 2022: This remote work tidal wave is seemingly making a geographic strategy more confusing / less manageable because the candidate pool is exponentially larger.

Before March 2020 I would ask hiring managers if they would consider remote candidates and the response was usually similar: “Yes we would consider that, but a local candidate would be preferred.”  Translation: If we are going to invest a premium in a recruiter, then the recruiter is going to need to find a local candidate.

100% on-site work certainly does seem to be a thing of the past, but I wonder if my value add as a professional recruiter need not include candidates within a specific locale.  I’m not sold yet