What is the career path for a recruiter?

Many occupations have a clearly defined career path. Recruiting does not seem to have a career path in most organizations. Having lunch with a Director of Resourcing from a bank he mentioned that a 1.5 year tenure is all the could expect for most recruiters. This tenure is even shorter in many agencies. The Conference Board of Canada has recently stated there will be a shortage of 90,000 IT professionals by 2010. The people with the strongest recruiters will survive.How do you retain recruiters? How do you motivate recruiters to stay in recruitment? What is the career path for recruiters? Do top recruiters succeed as managers of recruitment? How do you keep recruiters engaged in recruitment?