Crowdcruiting

Budgets are tight. Recruiting staffs are smaller. And still, we recruiters must continue to accomplish two key goals for our organizations. We must ensure that the openings we do have are filled quickly and with the best talent available. And, we must be preparing for the increase in demand for talent that will likely occur as the recovery takes hold.

The old fashioned way of accomplishing this double set of duties was to "do more with less." In practice, that meant squeezing longer hours out of fewer people. Such a notion may have sounded good in the Harvard Business Review, but out in the real world where we recruiters work, it was a formula for individual burn out and, ultimately, organizational mediocrity.

So, what's the alternative?

I'd like to propose a strategy that I call "crowdcruiting." The idea is simple enough: you harness the power of one or more groups that are already at your disposal and put them to work helping with the accomplishment of your recruiting requirements. Implementing that idea, however, is admittedly a little more difficult.

Crowdcruiting occurs when the recruiting team draws on the natural resources that most employers have, but under-utilize. These include:

the employees of their organization

and

the individuals whose resumes are achieved in their candidate management system database.

Here's how it works.

The Employees of the Organization

Today, most organizations operate employee referral programs. The new hires these programs generate are consistently rated among the best by recruiters and hiring managers. Yet, most organizations do little to manage these programs beyond establishing policies for referral payments and/or prizes. They do not provide the structure or guidance that would enable their employee referral program to engage more of their coworkers and draw on the best contacts they have in the world of work.

What might that structure and guidance look like? Here are some suggestions:

organize employee referral into recruiting channels. Then, appoint an internal champion to encourage and monitor participation within each channel. This approach gives all of the sales people or all of the engineers or all of the financial staff a sense of ownership in the recruiting process and a stake in who will be their colleagues

explicitly target the kind of talent you want to hire. Ask employees (and especially your "A" level performers) to think beyond family and friends and identify the best talent their field. Then, create an area on your organizational intranet to list these individuals, solicit input on their capabilities and personality from other employees, and identify potential contacts with them.

give employees some training. Coach all of your coworkers on the organization's value proposition as an employer and on articulating why they decided to work there. Then, transform the employee referral program from its typically hit or miss and reactive approach, to a proactive one by encouraging one or more individuals to connect with the prospects you've targeted.

The Candidate Management System Database

Most organizations spend hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of dollars, filling up their resume databases and then ignore those documents (and the people they represent). At best, recruiters perform a perfunctory search of the candidates for their new openings, but do little if anything to build relationships with them. Yet, this is a crowd that has demonstrated an interest in their employer and made the effort to apply for one of its openings. Why not leverage that engagement by transforming the candidate database from a pile of static records into a dynamic "candidate referral program."

What might that program look like? Here are some suggestions.

recognize that the resumes represent people. Develop a communications program that channels occupation and industry-specific content to the appropriate cohorts of the database. Then, promote your organization as an employer not by hard selling its open positions, but by providing useful information that can help them advance their career.

transform the database into a community. Not all of the applicants in your database will respond to the communications program, but many of those who do will want an even closer relationship with the organization. So, accommodate that interest by building a micro-site for applicants. Then, create an experience on that site that will encourage them to feel as if they too have a "home" in your organization.

ask for help. Reach out to your applicants and especially your micro-site crowd and ask them to help you find potential candidates for the openings you have which are not in their field. Depending on the reception you get, you might even adapt some of the ideas listed above for your employee referral program. Whatever approach you use, however, make clear from the outset that participation will have no impact on their personal application for employment and clearly define what, if any, reward there will be for referrals. Then, thank those who make the effort.

Crowdcruiting transforms the acquisition of talent from an activity pigeonholed in the HR Department to one that is executed by recruiters with assistance from others inside and outside the organization. Rather than doing more with less, it asks more of more people and thus is a more sustainable and, ultimately, effective approach.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/PeterWeddle




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