I spent 12 years in IT Recruiting and really enjoyed the job for the 1st 5-7 years, but sometime around 2010 or 2011 I started to see things changing. Qualifications kept getting more strictly required, job responsibilities combined, and salary/pay rates were not increasing like they had in the past. Finding the obscure (at the time) skill set in the latest/greatest programming language wasn't enough…now they needed the person to also manage databases and develop the front-end UI. They didn't want to hire a Network Server Admin and a Help Desk Support Tech…but find me a Help Desk guy with some network server “exposure”. Which was really code for “I want a Network Admin that is so desperate they will accept a Help Desk job.”
I finally left the industry because I no longer believed we (Recruiters) were a benefit to the candidates looking for jobs. What used to feel good about the job started feeling like a con job tricking people into accepting less than they actually deserved, and I was sick of it. I have been gone from that shitty industry for about 7 or 8 years and damn am I glad I left. The more I'm reading and watching the world around me it sounds like it has only gotten worse. Maybe it's industry specific…but I have a feeling it has gotten worse across the board.
I hope it gets better, but it doesn't seem to be going in the right direction.