Crowdsourcing the Recruitment Process

Published Jul-30-13

Breakthrough:
Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd allows the smartest people to shine, making crowdsourcing a powerful recruitment tool.

Company:
Code Together, United States

The Story:

Crowdsourcing can be an effective recruitment tool that draws the brightest and most able people. By posting competitions to assorted groups companies can see who is coming up with the most intelligent and innovative ideas. These are people they might want to attract into their organisation.

In fact, a 2012 survey by TJinsite, the research and knowledge arm of TimesJobs.com revealed that 57% of employers use crowdsourcing for recruitment purposes.

Enhanced Profiles

To generate more recognition and greater visibility to a handful of coders, Code Together, a provider of online collaborative tools for web developers held its ‘Creative Codeversationalist Contest'. The aim was to recognize journalists, bloggers and industry informants who excel at bringing the latest coding trends, applications, and techniques to wider attention.

During the nomination period, everyone from coding novices to veterans could vote for key contributors selected by Code Together, or they could nominate their own.

The winners were announced in May 2013 and they were:

• Craig Buckler, a Director of OptimalWorks, a UK consultancy that builds
websites
• Alex Handy, the Senior Editor of Software Development Times
• Andrew Oliver, a software consultant
• The top student codeversationalist was Lindsay Kuper, a PhD candidate at
the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University.

Although there was no prize money involved, the competition has considerably raised the profiles of its winners, giving developers greater insights into who they are turning to for information. Could this contest be a model to help raise the profile of individuals in other industries?

A New Kind of Recruitment

In one sense this kind of crowdsourcing approach is not particularly new to recruitment. For years agencies have sought the opinions of industry insiders to get their take on who might be suitable for a particular position or company.

Having said that, this isn’t the crowdsourcing approach we know today. Previously it only extended to the recruitment agency’s relatively limited pool of contacts.

Now, the instant global network of the Internet can bring the best and brightest from wherever they are in the world, right to your doorstep. And this can be done much faster and in a more cost-effective way than traditional recruitment agencies.

Where crowdsourcing really excels is that it not only brings to the fore an individual with a brilliant idea, but shows prospective employers how that person arrived at the solution. It is an opportunity to cherry-pick the cream of the crop whether for full-time employment or on a project by project basis.

Then there are also crowd based services where people are incentivized to refer a friend or colleague, someone with the right kind of skills and expertise for a particular job or assignment.

A Resume Boost

Many successful problems solvers are also now putting their open innovation and crowdsourcing achievements on their resumes, aware of the kudos and contracts that such achievements can bring.

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