What if you could get a whole lot of people to think about
your problem and come up with a set of ideas, and you really didn't have to pay
for it, and none of the people thinking about your problem really work for you?
Is that kind of thing possible?
By now we have all heard of Crowd Sourcing. There are lots
of crazy stories about finding gold mines, building space ships, solving social
ills that come out of crowd sourcing. I tried it: I got nothing.
But this got me thinking: Isn't all this connectivity that
is going on really the next step for crowd sourcing. Isn't posting a job on
Twitter or Linked In or any other social media site a form of crowd sourcing? Does
this mean recruiters are really cool geeks in disguise (OK – I am going too far
now!)
When we hire a new employee we just added (on average) 200
new Linked In connections, countless new friends on Facebook and who knows how
many Twitter-heads will now be able to re-tweet on behalf of our company.
Does that mean our company just got more connected?
It is not as far-fetched as it might seem, and the road to “hire
a network” may be closer than it seems. Here are three examples of jobs that
take advantage of their network every day:
- Sales: it has always been about connections for people in sales. Now, instead of a Rolodex, it is a huge network of social media connections. Do you think they just try and push product on those connections: No way.
- Technology: When one of your software engineers is baffled today, they go online to multiple user sites and pose the question to their peers. Within minutes there are a host of answers.
- Researchers: Same thing. They keep well connected through a variety of specialized sites that allow them to work with other people in the science industry who tackle similar types of problems.
Really, when you think about it, don’t these three jobs
really count on some form of crowd sourcing to help them get their job done
each and every day?
Will the operations manager be next?
How about HR? You bet.
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