Agencies and marketing departments now have access to innovative crowd sourcing recruitment platform Hiring Bounty through its partnership agreement with MarkLives.com Careers.
Hiring Bounty taps into networks of friends to bypass recruitment agents and crowd-source candidates for positions in the marketing and technology industries. The sites gives a cut of the recruitment ‘bounty’ set by employers to those recommending successful candidates as well as the candidates themselves.
It incentivises friends who already know the skill sets of one another as well as important considerations such as culture fit and personality to recommend friends for jobs. It also incentivises candidates to throw their hat into the ring, since there is a cash pay-out for both themselves and their friends, should theirs be the successful application.
The service has already successfully landed hard to find candidates for companies such as Woolworths, Urbian and World Wide Creative.
MarkLives was the first to report the news of the recruitment start-up in June, and is pleased to be associated with a category disruptor. We believe agencies will turn to this new initiative as the search for talented digital savvy individuals intensifies. Here Greg Schneider, MD of Hiring Bounty, describes the business model and some of the success it’s achieved since its launch.
Greg Schneider, MD of Hiring Bounty Crowdsourcing recruitment represents an enormous leap forward in an often out dated traditional 
recruitment industry. With a massive reduction in costs to clients, a significant improvement in the quality of candidates and the speed at which the position can be filled Crowdsourced recruitment is forging a new path for the otherwise stale recruitment industry.
Hiring Bounty is a crowdsourced recruitment platform – an African first. It is a platform which allows individuals to get paid to recommend their friends, ex-colleagues and business contacts for positions listed on the site. Levering the network effect, Hiring Bounty employs Crowdsourcing to connect the right individual with the right jobs. This is something which existing recruitment model often fails to achieve.
Crowdsourcing isn’t a new principle and has been in operation for more than a just few years. The first recorded usage was in 1714 where the British Government offered a prize for any scientist who was able to reliably determine longitude while at sea. An enormous prize of £20 000 was offered to the winner and hundreds of ideas were submitted. Similarly, the first Oxford English Directory (later called Concise Dictionary) was the output of crowdsourcing where 800 volunteers submitted words and definitions for the first publication.
The practice of crowdsourcing has come a very long way since its (not so) humble beginnings almost three hundred years ago. Many businesses have some component of crowdsourcing build into their mechanic – Google, Amazon, Dell and Wikipedia are all excellent examples. At its core crowdsourcing is the practice of “outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people” (Wikipedia). This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined group of people (the general public) rather than a specific body, such as paid employees. Through this distributed nature of the work a far larger group of individuals are incentivised (be it financial, social or cognitive) to perform a particular task.
In the recruitment industry this provides enormous advantages – especially compared to the traditional recruitment agency model. In the traditional model a job spec is sent to a recruitment agency, they then assign an individual to source CVs, that individual then invests some amount of time in finding appropriate candidates. It is this large time investment and associated overheads that forces traditional recruitment agencies to charge 17-25% of the annual salary of the employee.
In crowdsourced recruitment the single recruiter is replaced by a large distributed network of individuals who look on your behalf. Almost everybody knows somebody who could fit just about any role. Moreover, they understand the specific drivers of those individuals and the sorts of businesses which would appeal to them.
As the potential employer you set the cost and individuals who are willing to perform the task at that price will do so. Through crowdsourcing it’s possible to reach further into the group of potential employees using the social contracts between individuals to ensure that only relevant individuals are put forward for the position.
Hiring Bounty is walking a fresh path and is achieving great successes in a very short time. In the words of Mike Perk, MD of World Wide Creative, “It’s so nice to have a refreshingly new approach to recruitment. Using the community to source our latest employee was a breeze and the quality that came through was excellent. We’ll certainly be using Hiring Bounty again in the future – it’s a no brainer for us.”
Similarly brands such as Famous Brands and Urbian have successfully found “hard to find” positions for their business. Gary Willmott, Director at Urbianhad the following to say about his successful hire through Hiring Bounty. “Recruiters typically provide high volumes of low quality CVs. Hiring Bounty is refreshingly different – the very first CV we received ended up being the person we hired, it couldn’t be simpler. Best of all we didn’t have to sift through hundreds of CVs and waste our time and the efficiency to get the job posting up took literally minutes.”
Visit MarkLives Careers to find jobs, candidates as well as a little cash incentive, at http://careers.marklives.com/