The future of recruiting: Leveraging the crowd trend

April 01, 2013

Many people attend the Entrepreneurship 101 series to learn about complex topics related to startups, such as finance and intellectual property, sometimes overlooking topics like recruiting, which can also be complicated.

Recruiting involves understanding what your company needs now and what it may need in the future. This is often a difficult task, as all companies, not just startups, experience business inflection points and irregular revenue.

Last week’s Entrepreneurship 101 lecture focused on recruiting. More specifically, it focused on what a company needs, when it needs it and illustrated how to go about getting it.

Margo Crawford, president and CEO of Business Sherpa Group, discussed the fundamental tasks that businesses need to accomplish and the common work roles that are needed to accomplish those tasks. She also discussed the changing workforce and upcoming trends in recruiting methods.

Companies often take traditional approaches when recruiting, using methods such as the bricks and mortar model, in which employees are hired to work in house full time, with the addition of a few external service providers. This is one of the best-known recruitment models and has been practised for generations.

In addition to their core team, companies often rely on staff in remote working sites, which comes with the associated challenges, such as changes in labour market demographics, cultural diversity (particularly in Canada), rapidly changing technology and crowd sourcing.

Margo provided advice on how to rethink traditional methods of recruiting, extending the list of tasks that can be performed externally and how they can be performed. She demonstrated through case studies that workers do not have to be in close physical proximity in order to work together and be productive.

Crowd monetization

One success factor for businesses is the ability to monetize relationships with crowds. In her talk, Margo emphasized crowd monetization, a new trend in the labour market that involves four tools:

Contests
Collaborative communities
Complementors
Crowd labour markets

In her lecture, Margo explained each tool in detail, describing how it works. She also provided a chart to easily delineate what type of work best suits each tool to help you decide the best approach for your company.

Although having an internal core team with traditional incentives, like salaries, is still important, it is worth looking into alternative methods of recruiting externally through crowds, which have additional intrinsic incentives to fuel their work.

Learn how to leverage the crowd trend by watching Margo’s full presentation here.

http://vimeo.com/62890512

Produced by MaRS Media.

Short on time? Check out the Hot Tips video on recruitment and selection strategies.