As the role of HR in organisations evolve with the changing times, crowdsourcing in HR helps to proactively drive change in the corporate culture by developing a truly innovative and creative workforce.
The typical role of a HR in owning an employee experience transits from hire to retire, they play a crucial role in driving talent management strategies that make crowdsourcing efforts successful. HR functions are seldom more than an administrative function as they lack innovation and change.
According to recent report published by PwC titled, ‘Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing’ it says, “Crowdsourcing presents a strategic opportunity for HR leaders to champion a collaborative digital enterprise that will bring the organization into today’s community centric culture. The ultimate value of an internal crowdsourcing initiative will be the creation of a collaborative culture that champions fresh ideas and mirrors the community-centric nature of the Internet at large.”
Crowdsourcing efforts will help channelize the creativity of employees and allure best talent to jobs in the next millennium. Gen-Y likes to function in a flat organisational structure devoid of hierarchies. They expect to function in communities sharing mutual passion and interests. Herein the far-reaching effects of digital collaboration, made possible through social networking platforms can be seen in the Gen-Y’s outlook towards jobs and careers in the future.
Also people management strategies have to change in organisations to not resemble pyramid structures, but with a Facebook like appeal to be socially inviting and user-friendly to attract best talent force on board. Crowdsourcing is being increasingly used by organisations today for its enhanced cost-effectiveness and increased efficiency.
Crowdsourcing being a new tool for HRs to help find suited candidates for the perfect job; the innovative efforts put in the search pattern are nevertheless easy. Only through effective communication with an employee and cross-verification of their backgrounds and expertise, along with clear idea on reputation of the source, recruitment via crowdsourcing can be facilitated.
See: Don’t Think the Performance Reviews are Accurate? Crowdsource!
Since crowdsourcing presents new set of challenges to the role of HR, and broadens their scope of operations, the management needs to wake up to uplift the proficiencies and competencies of HR professionals to meet the crowdsourcing requirements.
Crowdsourcing in HR further helps to gather opinions of employees on understanding the culture needs and to get them more engaged. This would involve, that a human resource personnel should also be social media savvy to understand, connect and bond with employees through social engagement techniques and practices.
The future of HR is digitally wired globally and to attract the best talent, HR needs to be constantly in touch with the millennial generation. Crowdsourcing might seem a great development to boost HR practices in the industry, but all it means is to tap into the collective potential and wisdom of large number of crowds and create a strong brand image.
The HR leaders of the future need to have a well defined agenda. Based on conversation with digital natives, they need to feed in their feedback into the system. This can also be seen as tapping into crowd-intelligence, which should be a habit inculcated for future HR leaders and managers.
By being a people magnet and constantly tapping into the collective wisdom of the crowd, HR professionals can stay in sync with their organisational needs and meet the increasing staffing demands. This dynamic approach to HR practices with the help of crowdsourcing platform will prove to benefit the HR community because of its flexibility and cumulative intelligence.
The role of HR is not just about asking the right questions, but also about seeking answers to commonly encountered problems by employees to ensure better satisfaction and higher engagement levels at work. HRs need to know whom they need to ask, to set benchmarks for the competition.
Also read: 5 Employee Referrals Trends Companies Would Need to Know