Crowdstaffing is one of the most common buzz words in the recruitment industry. What is it really? What does working in such a model look like on a daily basis? What are the challenges of working with the crowd? We invite you to the first article in the series “Crowdstaffing without secrets”, in which we will talk with employees and Talent Place partners about their experiences related to Crowdstaffing . Nadia Harris-Kosior was the first to share her knowledge.
Nadia joined the Talent Place team in 2019. Currently, he is our Expansion Business Partner, i.e. responsible for the expansion and development of the company. Its role is not only to attract new partners, including foreign partners, but also to develop people within the organization. As she says herself: “in order to be able to actually implement the idea of expansion, acquire customers and maintain good relations with them, the organization must use its potential, be aware of the path it is following and how it translates into the company’s development”.
What is Crowdstaffing according to Nadia Harris-Kosior?
What was your career path like before you got to Talent Place?
I came to the HR industry a few years ago, after previously working in a completely different sector and on projects. At the beginning, I dealt with cooperation with clients, then the recruitment of candidates, and then I managed the entire HR team. Ultimately, my scope of responsibility increased and I managed the entire company both in terms of operations, sales, recruitment strategies, marketing and organizational development. After some time in HR, I decided to work with several companies at the same time to develop my portfolio of experiences. In one of them I heard about Talent Place. At that time, I had a large recruitment project to implement, so I used the support of Talent Place and became its client. During this cooperation, it turned out that Talent Place needed help in recruiting to foreign markets, and that I had done it before, I agreed. In this way, I finalized recruitment for Talent Place in Germany and the Netherlands.
Crowdstaffing: have you heard of this before?
Talent Place was not my first contact with the team. I work remotely for several companies at the same time. Hence, I know that this model works very well and I understand exactly what it involves from the inside. However, when it comes to working in such a model from the client’s perspective, Talent Place was the first recruitment company based on crowdstaffing that I came across.
What made you trust this idea? Did you have any concerns?
The worries that accompanied me at the beginning were that although the idea itself is very attractive, it is not known how it all looks from the inside. How do I understand crowdstaffing at the moment? In my opinion, we can understand it in two ways. On the one hand, as a distributed community that provides as many applications as possible, and on the other hand, one that works qualitatively and provides the best Candidates.
In the case of Talent Place, we approach crowdstaffing in a way that allows us to combine these two elements. We do not provide Candidates, as long as we send a CV to the Client, although one might think that this is what recruiting by the crowd is all about. We make the most of the fact that we have a dispersed community of recruiters, and at the same time we have people in the network who know exactly which segment of the labor market to “hit” and what Candidates to look for. The point is not to assign 10 random recruiters to a given project, but to consciously and skillfully choose the people who are involved in it. At the end of the day, the goal is to provide the customer with an application of sufficient quality to relieve him of numerous operational activities. So I do not see any point in duplicating patterns or solutions that are no longer effective. I believe in recruitment based on something more than job portals.
What kind of crowdstaffing reactions does people you want to collaborate with?
On the one hand, when they hear about this idea, they say “wow, that’s cool, finally something else!” This usually happens when we are dealing with someone who is looking for innovative solutions. Such people usually want to take on a new challenge and do more! Then, indeed, this topic is a positive surprise for them, and they react to it very enthusiastically.
However, there are clients who are surprised by such a solution and recruitment based on the community of remote recruiters raises their doubts. Several times it happened to me that a client questioned the ethics of working from home for more than one company at a time. This surprised me a lot, because, firstly, I see no grounds for an employee not to be able to engage in more than one professional activity, and secondly – in this model, there is no question of violating the prohibitions on competition.
Various examples of crowdstaffing
What objections do you encounter most often and how do you deal with them?
As I mentioned before, sometimes clients question the ethics of remote work for several companies. Then I communicate that we have such an extensive database of recruiters, our expertise and processes by which we monitor the community that we do not allow violation of the prohibitions on competition. I also try to give specific examples and explain to them that if, for example, someone worked in recruitment in the e-commerce industry and then moved to marketing, it does not mean that they will be recruiting for a competitive company.
On the other hand, when I explain what this model is all about and emphasize its innovativeness, the fact that it is simply new is not enough. As you know, you also need to be able to convince yourself of the news. I would like to point out that recruitment portals are not as effective as they used to be. Let us imagine the example of recruiting employees from abroad who do not know Polish and sometimes do not even know about the existence of such portals, so are not able to apply. The quality of recruitment agencies’ services is also not always what we would expect. This is due to the fact that the best recruiters who want to carry out high-level recruitment very often resign from working in an agency for the benefit of internal HR departments in companies or start acting “on their own”.
What do you think proves the competitive advantage of such a model of operation?
The advantages of crowdstaffing are that we have recruiters in the community – specialists in their industries, dispersed in various locations who know exactly who to look for, because each of them already has their own network of potential Candidates. For a better illustration, I will cite the example of Marta Ambroziak, Client and current recruiter of Talent Place, who compared the labor market to a lake with a variety of fish. We, as Talent Place, have our recruiters who are “fishermen” and know exactly where and what fish to catch. There is no coincidence here.
What do you think is the future of recruiting with the recruiting community?
It seems to me that the future of recruitment is definitely quality. Therefore, all the processes that arise must be at the highest possible level. They should also anticipate the needs of “business”. Let us realize that the models that are currently available on the market are becoming less and less effective. Of course, there are many innovative solutions, such as new recruitment portals, new methods of candidate evaluation, etc., but these are the nuances. In order to be able to go one step further, the foundation, which is undoubtedly quality, must first be taken care of.
In my opinion, crowdstaffing is able to get the best out of any recruitment model and make quantity, quality and innovation complement each other. In my opinion, this is what the future of recruiting will look like.
