Crowded field of crowdsourcing recruiting platforms: how many will stay?
What happens when there are lots of crowdsourcing platforms to choose from for a single task?
Chris Russell recently posted a thoughtful piece on LinkedIn on the current players in crowdsourcing recruiters to help employers hire. What was surprising to me was that he listed 7 of them.
These days crowdsourcing is becoming more and more commonplace and accepted. And it can seem like each particular area for crowdsourcing already has its frontrunners (e.g. Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Uber and Lyft). In the “younger” spaces for crowdsourcing such as in this case with recruiters for HR departments, there can be lots of competition.
Based on a quick look through the 7 sites, many seem to be fairly compelling. Scout is integrated into common Applicant Tracking Systems employers use, such as IBM Kenexa, Oracle Taleo, and PCRecruiter. RecruitLoop has been featured in TechCrunch, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others, and Recruitifi in Newsweek. SL8Z features clients Siemens and Catalent on their website, with the Catalent VP Global Talent Acquisition saying, “We’ve been using SL8Z for search assignments in the US and Asia. The system is easy to use and candidate flow is really fast.”
As an employer choosing between the different sites, I can imagine that it could be hard to decide which one or ones to try. Of course, the different platforms have slightly different models. With some, you select a recruiter first and pay for their time (e.g. RecruitLoop) and with others you select the candidate and pay the recruiter who proposed them (e.g. JobHuk and Recruitifi). The pricing mechanisms are also different across the platforms.
Ultimately I think what will determine which are the winners who stay and how many of them there are is how many different lasting employer preferences there are for this process. It’s hard to tell right now whether there are one or two major models will win out and which platforms will execute them the best. For now the competition remains fierce.