Hiring and retaining new talent and skills must feature in the top three priorities of every HR department in the country…maybe even the world.  It’s a significant – and costly – problem, as new millennial workers begin to demand a completely new way of working in return for access to their cutting-edge skills.

Millennials are looking for a unique worker experience offering greater flexibility and opportunities to rise to the occasion.  It’s a complete mind shift, with many considering non-traditional paths to monetise their skills.  A full time, permanent, well-remunerated role just doesn’t cut it any more.  

With more and more workers signing up to new gig economy, a movement where suppliers or practitioners provide specialist services or skills on a freelance basis, could this type of role give the new generation of workers the  freedom they crave by choosing ‘journeys’ over jobs.

Rather than sticking to tried and tested recruitment methods and continually trying to find candidates who match a traditional job specification, forward-thinking HR and business leaders have recognised that tapping into the gig economy can be the solution to many of their challenges. 

A faster route to success

First up, many companies are exploring crowdsourcing as an alternative way of accessing and engaging industry-leading talent in a more flexible way.  Crowdsourcing provides an ‘elastic’ talent pool that you can dip in and out of, dependent on requirements. 

What’s more, the best crowdsource communities are rich with young, motivated, uniquely and highly-skilled individuals and teams.  By deploying their skills in this way – as opposed to being confined to a specific role in-house – they get the chance to work for multiple companies, on a range of unique briefs and projects that can help grow and monetise their skills at a greater pace. 

Overcoming the resource crunch

As well as answering immediate talent issues, crowdsourcing also provides a great solution to alleviate resource pressures, by providing access to skilled resource that can work on a project-by-project basis, in isolation or to bolster existing teams and in-house skills.  IT for example, an industry that depends on specialists rather than generalists, continues to suffer understaffed departments creating inefficiencies that subsequently lead to delays in project deliveries. Our recent Future of Work study which surveyed IT executives and staff in the UK and US found that nearly 69 per cent of both C-suite and rank-and file IT staff consider a well-resourced IT department as the top factor new hires consider when evaluating a job offer.

Rather than having to make a business case for permanent or expensive contract workers, HR teams can turn on crowdsourced resource when specific needs and expertise arise.

Winning at work

The competitive nature of tendering work via crowdsourcing – an RFP process that gives employers the option to select the best of the responses to any given brief – means respondents need to up their game.  The fact that they sit outside of your own organisation, and have worked with other companies with common issues – means that their thinking is not limited by what’s gone before, or how things are usually done.  They will have proven experience and credentials to deliver work in new and innovative ways.

In addition, the highly skilled experts that make up the ‘crowd’ will approach each competitive brief with a view to stretching themselves to win peer group and client approval.  Their success is entirely governed by their own initiative, creative problem fixing and vision.

Added to that the fact that crowdsourced projects are paid for based on results (not time or effort), and the rationale for tapping into this pool of talent and expertise becomes even more compelling. 

Being innovative has become the key to gaining the competitive edge, but this new approach to identifying and using exceptional talent to build momentum could be seen as going against the grain of balancing costs with revenue, business longevity and financial stability.  Crowdsourcing addresses the pain points of businesses and HR departments worldwide but it also addresses the needs of the millennial worker. It’s the scenario that organisations need to strive for to win at this new way of work.