I agree with smvsiyer. The recruitment industry has changed so much in the last 2 years. The most important and notable change is the clear definition of requirements that companies are coming up with on job roles and profile descriptions. Earlier, an applications developer on .net was required to know C# or VB.net with 2 years experience. Also required was exposure to windows CE. And now, companies are clearly defining the person required. The same way, recruiters who screen out resumes are evolving to that who understand requirements and can identify people without any/much effort.
Hence, people specializing in identifying human resources/talent, and now, they have a different identifier (name), recruiters. They are just a bunch of HR guys specializing in one particular activity, recruitment.
Recruiters are not idetified alongside other HR, becasue, their role does not involve handling internal customers, but rather selling the company and job to external, prospective employees. Moreover, they do not do typical HR interviews, but tend to do technical assessments (or screening) to reduce time invested in the recruitment process by eliminating "junk" (as per individual company standards!) and passing on only "quality" (as per individual company standards!) to the technical panel.
The projection is that recruiters with further move away from the HR interviews in the recruitment process by providing an initial full assessment (technical and HR) before letting a candidate getting into the recruitment process.
Hence, the "HR consultant" working in staffing firms MUST understand that their activity is simply further moving them away from a generalist or specialist HR role, towards a specialized recruiter's role.
A degree in Business Administration or Social Work is to ensure that the hire knows processes and policies of talent management and labour laws. And the nature of role requires understanding of technology. Hence the need for the qualification, and the contrasupportive knowledge.
A degree in psychology is with an assumption that personality profiling and assessments are effectively done by people with such background (though, honesly, I would defer to such assumptions!)
Thats what I have to say about it.
PL&E