Everything, it seems, is at our fingertips nowadays. We can have a tax return submitted, a loan application completed, or a holiday booked within the hour, having not left the house.
Sometimes that's great, especially when you're pushed for time.
After all, who wants to spend hours with their accountant?
The prospect of hanging out with a travel agent on a busy Saturday afternoon is slightly more appealing.
But in reality, you'd have seen a few extra dollars in your tax return if you'd invested the time and sat with your accountant for a while. And the mortgage broker's advice on which loan type is right for you would undoubtedly have saved you time shopping around and perhaps even saved you a bit in interest and fees.
While it's tempting in our technology-enabled world to do things independently, having an expert in your corner can pay dividends in the long run. It ensures you're armed with the proper knowledge and have access to advise and guidance when needed – without having to do the legwork yourself.
The same theory plays out when looking for a job.
why search for an appointment online, submit an application for something that sounds okay and hope for the best?
How about working with a professional, a human coach with who you can bounce ideas? Who can give you advice and guidance? Who has your interests – not a desire to fill a role with anybody – driving them?
We are living in an era of information saturation and data overload. We haven't got the time in our day to read everything there is to read out there, to decipher all of the data we can access.
It can be overwhelming if you try to do it yourself – searching for the perfect holiday, the best loan or a possible job. How do you know – with long-term certainty – what to look at and ignore?
Ideally, we need someone who knows what they're talking about to help us.
Recruiters will add further value in coming years as talent agents – similar to the likes of NFL and AFL players. We'll be career managers. Many in the recruitment sector believe, "Let's move as many jobs as possible and as many people as we can."
poor recruiters play the numbers game, and that approach has no future.
Instead, the best recruiters concentrate on the proper position; plan your next move strategically while looking at the skills you need to develop to either step up the ladder or move into a genuinely career-advancing role in three years.
That role of a talent agent or career coach, where you work with someone over several years and trust them implicitly, can only be done by a human – and an intelligent, emotionally-sensitive one.
Technology will continue to help make parts of the process more efficient. However, technology will not be able to know that, for example, you and your partner are planning children in a year, so you'd like to be in a role closer to home with flexible working arrangements.
Or help you discover that the sector you're currently in isn't fulfilling you, but with some external training, your core skills would be ideal for company X.
Or that because you currently work in a particular industry, your pay-TV subscription and that magazine you love are tax-deductible.
