Is Crowdsourcing the Future of Recruitment?

[Joywtome231]

One area of finance that has really taken off in recent years is that of crowdfunding. This is where large numbers of investors either buy shares or advance loans to a business. It can’t have escaped readers’ notice that comparison sites are also big business with websites available for comparing services as diverse as holidays, insurance and bank accounts.

With the advent of these services it really was only a matter of time before the aspects of crowdsourcing and comparison made its way into the arena of recruitment and indeed there are clear signs of this appearing in the marketplace with recruitment agency comparison sites and crowdsourcing channels appearing.

The principle of crowdsourcing is simple; users leverage the power of the internet to gather a china phone number library crowd of people to solve a specific problem. This can be as simple as raising money for a new business or finding donors for a charity project.
Members of the project choose to donate a small amount of time, money or knowledge to solve the particular issue that was the focus of the exercise.

In the sphere of recruitment, the process can take the simplest form of a personal posting on social media such as Facebook or Twitter, letting the recruiters’ contacts know that an opportunity is available. Although this is somewhat haphazard there is a more structured and professional way to crowdsource candidates.

Split-fee recruitment is the process of sharing the workload of sourcing the right client for a role with other agencies. The job is placed using a crowdsourcing platform and publicised privately to a series of professional recruitment consultants. On successful placement the initial or ‘prime’ recruiter receives a proportion of the fee from the client and the remainder is passed on to the secondary or subcontracting recruiter. Utilising the power of the crowd in this way has a major benefit to both the client and their recruitment consultant.