I met a recruiter this week. Ostensibly it was to talk about some possible new roles, but really I just wanted to get a better feel for what's going on in the market (and ideally some inside gossip). Recruiters are normally pretty good for this, because it's their job to be talking to as many significant people in the industry as possible.

To be honest I'm a rotten client for recruiters. I'm always happy to meet them for coffee, but I hardly ever spend any money with them. There are several reasons for this. One, I'm stingy, so I resent paying someone several thousand pounds just to email me a CV. Two, part of me is convinced that I could find the right person myself, given a bit of time and effort - and I feel guilty about paying other people to do things I could do myself. In fact, I've always quite fancied being a recruiter (a proper one I mean, not a glorified telesales merchant); it seems to me that you basically just spend your days chatting to people and trying to match candidates to jobs. It's actually one of my fall-back plans if my business ends up getting credit-crunched (although I accept that this wouldn't exactly be the ideal time to get into recruitment).

Now you might well argue, in response to these two points, that this is the point of the recruitment industry: you pay someone to spend time sourcing, screening and introducing candidates to you precisely because you don't have the time/ money/ resource to do it yourself. And of course, you'd be absolutely right.

However, the other big issue with recruitment these days is that it's getting a lot easier to do yourself. The best recruiters have a huge array of contacts willing to take their calls, and they can retain enough information about people's personalities, ambitions, skills and circumstances to match them to specific roles. If they don't know the right person immediately, they'll know someone who does. But nowadays, there are all sorts of social network programmes that do most of this stuff for you - so why pay a recruiter?

For instance, this week I was trawling through LinkedIn and came across this American guy, who'd worked for a company with a product quite similar to the one I want to launch. He's now in London, so I dropped him a line and we arranged to meet for a coffee (I mostly want to pick his brains, but I figure that if he's any good I might even try and hire him in some capacity).

The thing is that since he has a job already, and isn't looking to move, my chances of finding him through standard recruitment channels would have been minuscule. And when you think about it, professional online networks are still at a relatively early stage of adoption - once people start managing their careers online as well as their social lives, and the programs get more and more sophisticated, I can't help wondering if it might be game over for recruiters. Which would also mean I'd need a new Plan B.