European higher education institutions have long and strong traditions in how they recruit new academic staff. Over the last decades these traditions have been challenged in a number of ways, and one can observe various adaptations of institutional procedures, routines and practices in the recruitment process. At the same time, most of the adaptations are internally anchored and hardly relate to the growing demands towards higher education institutions to become more directly relevant to society. In this presentation I will discuss how higher education institutions have adapted their recruitment processes, and the extent to which these adaptations can be regarded as sufficient, given the dramatic changes in the relationship between higher education and society.