Why Crowdsourcing Is The Future Of Recruitment

Recruitment is one of the major processes that the HRM department of an organization undertakes. According to statistics, on average 50%-70% of the time of HR actually goes into the recruiting process (De Cenzo & Robbins, 1996).

In addition, recruitment is very essential in an organization so to select employees who will aid the company reach its highest potential as well as meet its mission and vision.

With changing times and technological advancements, several not-so-traditional methods for recruitment have emerged in the market.

For example, Event Recruiting, pioneered by Cisco an American multinational technology conglomerate, is a method that involves becoming involved in events that are attended by the people the company is looking to hire and establishing the brand name. In the case of programmers in Silicon Valley, the choice spots have been microbreweries, marathons, and bike races. (Wheeler, 2000).

Another major innovative method that is extensively being used for recruitment in recent years is Crowdsourcing. A large number of companies, some of which include Fortune 500s, like Canon, Saint Gobain, John Hancock, and more, largely rely on the method as well. In general, Crowdsourcing is the practice of employing the services of a large number of people using the internet for obtaining information or input into a task or project (Safire, 2009).

The term Crowdsourcing is relatively new with it being coined in the last decade only (Zimmerman, 2016). However, due to the fact that it is cutting edge and inexpensive as compared to traditional methods, it has been comfortably adapted by the millennials as part of their daily lives. In addition to this, crowdsourcing is touching all social and business interactions and changing the way the organizations work, hire, research, make, and market.

According to a survey done by TimeJobs, 58% of organizations are using crowdsourcing for hiring and 48% of them find it to be the most effective way to hire talent (TimesJob, 2014).

In the field of recruitment, crowdsourcing applies the principles of an employer using a community of independent recruiters to source resumes for a particular job. In comparison to the traditional methods for recruitment where employers hire expensive recruitment services like staffing agencies, crowdsourcing involves a large pool of independent recruiters to source candidates for a flexible, cost-effective split fee.

The process involves the job vacancy being placed on a crowdsourcing platform as well as being advertised to professional recruitment consultants, after which the primary consultants receive a small part of the fee, and the rest is sent to the secondary recruiter. The set of recruiters would each recommend the best-fit talent and the employer would get a pool of talent recommenders by different recruiters.

Crowdsourcing is very similar to employee referral, a form of the traditional method of recruitment, however, it has a much wider scope because the job opportunities are publicized on the social media network of organizations, recruiters, and recruitment agencies, while for employee referral it is limited to internal employees and their limited recommendations.

There have also been several companies to facilitate the process of crowdsourcing, which include organizations like TalentCrowd, visage, Recruitifi, RecruitLoop, IndeedCrowd, Reflik. Some of them like Reflik are also operating in India and cast a wide net to find top candidates through an extensive network of recruiters and industry professionals.

One major example of recruitment using crowdsourcing is Uber- a major taxi service that uses an app to connect riders with taxi drivers present in the nearby area for standardized prices and was one of the first companies to use crowdsourcing to create the resource pool of car drivers.

Another major company is Google that relies on internal crowdsourcing by having its already hired employees give feedbacks about potential candidates with whom they share similarities in terms of experience like having attended the same university or previously worked for the same company.

Extending from there, crowdsourcing is now being extensively used as a method of recruitment. In fact, studies suggest that while the growth of crowdsourcing as a means of recruitment in India since then has grown at 15 per annum until 2016, in the coming years, it is expected to grow at 25 percent, considering how big companies are also now turning towards the much more efficient method (Economics times, 2018)

A number of organizations are now using it as a method for building a proactive strong candidate pipeline like a virtual bench of candidates for the anticipated and existing requirements. Largely, sectors like the internet and e-commerce, airlines, engineering, banking, and financial services and automation use crowdsourcing, primarily because of their niche and specialized requirements.

This method is beneficial to both recruiters and clients since it results in a much more efficient and cost-friendly method for clients, and also presents itself as a lifeline to recruiters, who may put use their expertise to use and also put to use the power of a crowd to find difficult to source employee. Therefore, while there are several new methods for recruitment evolving with the change in needs and functioning of organizations, crowdsourcing seems likely to remain an important one.

There are several reasons contributing to the popularity of crowdsourcing. One of the major reasons is that it attracts a large pool of candidates across large demography. According to a report on Global Recruiting Trends 2017, 40% of organizations are mainly focusing on social media networks to hire talents (Schnidman, Hester, Pluntke, Ignatova, & Abbot, 2017).

Secondly, using crowdsourcing for hiring, it aids in attracting the best talent available which the organization might not be able to through the traditional means. The talent shortage is one of the biggest hiring challenges today and crowdsourcing can help organizations find the right fit and top talent. In addition, for jobs that require niche skills, it is a very effective tool.

For example, Accenture Technology Services has crowdsourced more than 240,000 experienced quality assurance testers all over the world in order to gain benefits such as dynamic capacity, expanded geographic coverage, access niche skills, and faster time-to-market. Moreover, it is cheap and less time consuming as the organization only needs to pre-screened resumes.

Conclusion

In the end, it can be said that while crowdsourcing is a relatively new method being used for recruitment, it is quite effective as well and is being used widely by large companies such as Uber for acquiring talent. However, the fact remains that the traditional methods of recruitment still hold value and thus cannot be completely replaced by newer methods. The best solution is to actually use both traditional and non-conventional methods so to recruit the best candidates available in the market.