Should You Start Crowdsourcing Talent?

The race to secure top talent is leading employers to try and adopt all kinds of new and innovative hiring practices. We already know that companies like Google have set the benchmark with new and innovative hiring practices. Zappos has decided to differentiate itself from the innovative employers, (now being regarded as one of the more innovative innovative employers), by doing things like offering employees $1,000 to resign if they don’t feel suited to the Zappos culture. Now the employer branding, poster child has moved it up a gear by doing away with job postings and choosing to hire all of its employees exclusively through social recruiting from Zappos’ talent community.

Moving to a total social recruiting model was always the logical progression from using employee referrals as part of a multichannel hiring strategy. In many respects, you need to shut down the other channels in order to get the full benefit from referral and social recruiting.

So, now the world has seen the potential of social recruiting to ‘go large’; I wonder if this now paves the way for crowdsourcing, the kind of black sheep of social recruiting, to make its second coming. Yes, it appeared once; it raised its head above the parapet and slunk away. But, now this less discerning end of social recruiting has the opportunity to ride the momentum and wave of optimism around social recruiting and sneak  into our consciousness through the back door. Social recruiting has landed in the form of employee referrals and talent community hiring, making the ground fertile for crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, buoyed by the success of crowdfunding is where you potentially enlist the power of all 7 billion people on the planet to help with your hiring initiatives, (not just employees or ‘insiders’) by having public contests where anyone in the world can refer talent to your business in return for an incentive. Crowdsourcing was once a dirty word, but I think it has gained credibility from the success of crowdfunding initiatives and the proliferation of social recruiting via employee referrals. But, it’s not just gaining credibility, it’s also gaining traction as GiveForward, (admittedly a crowdfunding platform), managed to get 197 applicants for a marketing VP position via crowdsourcing which compares favorably to a customer service position that drew 116 applications without using a contest.

There’s an inherent fear that going to the masses will not deliver quality, but I think this fear can be reasoned away with logic. Sure, to begin with, lightweight talent scouts might refer poor quality candidates but surely they would be weeded out as soon as they realized there was no return from their efforts, e.g. no reward and no friends thanking them for being interviewed. I think the cream would quickly rise to the top in terms of quality of crowdsourced talent scouts.

So, now there is growing evidence that crowdsourcing can deliver incremental applicants, the quality of which should increase over time as poor talent scouts are weeded out due to lack of ROI. I also think that social recruiting is getting an established foothold in the hiring world, which means the time may be right for employers to take their first foray into talent crowdsourcing.