How Business Leaders Can "Make It Rain" with The Human Cloud
As Staffing Industry Analysts reported last year, “companies processed between $47 billion and $51 billion U.S. dollars (USD) in spend associated with the human cloud on a global basis.” We’ve entered a new era of work where our tools, processes, and people function in “the cloud.” This is, like it or not, business as usual these days. Traditional structures are crumbling under the weight of the Amazon effect and giving way to elastic operations that allow business leaders to make real-time adjustments in the workforce. With innovation as a priority for every company, this dynamic is essential to maintaining a competitive edge. It’s unlikely that this protracted war for talent will eventually be won by the old “boots on the ground” mentality. Tomorrow’s victors will be employers with their heads in the clouds -- in this case, the human cloud.
Needles and Haystacks
Business leaders know it’s a worker’s market right now. Talent have the upper hand in negotiations, and those with sought-after skill sets can command greater compensation, incentives, and choices in employers. Waiting for your ideal candidate to complete tedious applications on job boards or walk through your doors won’t solve the crisis.
The problem for hiring managers has become twofold: attracting exceptional workers and finding them quickly. It sounds like a torment ripped from the pages of Dante’s Purgatory -- the exhausting search for a solitary needle in a massive haystack.
The analogy has always amused me. Isn’t it strange, given the leaps in human ingenuity and technology, to puzzle over finding the proverbial needle manually? Sure, the metaphor of futility makes sense; it’s just a question of why anyone would engage in it. Why search through all that hay looking for a needle? Wouldn’t it make more sense to grab a magnet and let it draw the needle out of the crowd? This is exactly how employers can optimize their hiring strategies -- by tasking these initiatives to staffing curators who, like magnets, can find the best workers in the human cloud.
Clearing the Fog from the Human Cloud
The human cloud borrows its name from “cloud computing,” a digital networking process that enables universal access to a pool of shared resources. It’s a concept most companies already understand. The majority of HR technologies i use have predominantly shifted to cloud-based, “as a service” type systems. The human cloud provides a similarly networked structure that connects employers to vital human resources.
As Sarah O’Connor explained in The Financial Times, “Employers are starting to see the human cloud as a new way to get work done. White-collar jobs are chopped into hundreds of discrete projects or tasks, then scattered into a virtual ‘cloud’ of willing workers who could be anywhere in the world, so long as they have an internet connection.”
Overall, human cloud revenues have doubled since 2016. SIA attributes this growth the popularity of the B2C segment, which generates close to 90 percent of the money. However, it’s not just juggernauts like Uber that are cashing in on the human cloud. In three short years, crowd-based staffing solutions captured 8.5 percent of the market. In the next five years, they’re poised to grow by an average of 50 percent. Traditional staffing? Not even seven percent. Yet these “human intermediation platforms” are still missing one key ingredient: curation. Without a measure of quality control and oversight, a crowd can become a mob.
“The line between online staffing and traditional staffing is becoming thinner, as seeming hybrid models, such as just-in-time-staffing, have become prevalent,” SIA noted in its Gig Economy and Human Cloud Landscape 2017 Update.
Deloitte also touted the benefits to industrious professionals with entrepreneurial spirits: “It’s easy to see why a ‘human cloud’ approach can potentially benefit both employers and workers looking for greater flexibility and the opportunity to be rewarded for excellent work. Overall, it has the potential to balance pay with performance on a global stage, regardless of demographics or location.”
Pioneering talent solutions are now bringing out the full potential of the human cloud to enhance and replace traditional staffing models for all business needs and positions -- not just one-off projects. In these models, crowdsolving and crowdsourcing transform into robust hiring solutions.
Smaller organizations, for example, may not have the resources to locate the best talent for seasonal needs, projects, temporary assignments, part-time work, sudden ramp-ups or vital permanent positions. Internal recruiters have limited talent networks to draw from, and typically rely on a couple of major job boards. For clients using traditional placement agencies, these same limitations come into play -- sourcing efforts target a narrow pool of active candidates through a few job boards and social networks. Although more resumes arrive, hiring managers continue to struggle with finding the candidates they need.
But too many in the industry think crowd-based recruiting is just throwing requisitions into the void and awaiting a response. That sort of spray-and-pray mentality is how crowds become riots. They key to our success has come from curation -- delivering all the benefits of parallel sourcing strategies while imposing controls that assure compliance. This is the edge that allows companies to reap the advantages of crowd-based solutions.