Firms are looking for anything they can use to help them source talent in this tight labor market. One up-and-coming method that shows great promise for talent acquisition is crowdsourcing. You’ve probably heard of crowdsourcing for raising money or tackling large research endeavor, but it can also be extraordinarily helpful for recruiting top executive talent. What is Crowdsourcing for Talent? Crowdsourcing is when information is obtained by enlisting the services of a large number of people through paid or unpaid media. Crowdsourcing typically leverages social media and involves thousands of people to get the desired result. The idea behind crowdsourcing is that it provides collective knowledge or resources to improve an experience or achieve a goal. A number of tools have cropped up in executive recruiting for crowdsourcing purposes, but how do these tools work? Some tools invite groups of executives, who may be interested in executive positions for themselves or may even be interested in helping their friends and colleagues find positions. ExecThread, for instance, has over 32,000 executives in its network, providing a large, ready-made group of both potential candidates and others who may have access to potential candidates. Since the tool’s inception, over 10,000 confidential executive-level jobs have been presented to and considered by ExecThread members; with well over 100 of the positions having been filled to date. Another method of crowdsourced recruiting involves groups of recruiters. Instead of one recruiting firm or in-house executive search team handling a search by using referrals or a talent network, crowdsourced recruiting involves companies submitting executive job openings to hundreds of recruiters all at once. The recruiter who produces the hired candidate then gets financially compensated. Sl8z is one example of a recruiter-based crowdsourcing tool. Advantages of Crowdsourcing for Executive Talent The main advantage of executive crowdsourcing is that it exposes your job to a much larger pool of interested candidates, consultants with executive contacts, and/or recruiters with their own pools of candidates to draw from. Sheer size is always the advantage of crowdsourcing; the larger the pool, the more likely an ideal or exceptional candidate will be found. While crowdsourcing tools can be used as the main means of recruiting for an executive position, they can also be used by in-house executive recruiters to expand their reach when acquiring talent. Used in conjunction with a tool like Thrive TRM, crowdsourcing can take some of the guesswork out of talent acquisition and yield highly qualified and interested candidates for your executive searches. No longer do searches have to take several months or years to lead to a quality hire. Contact us for more information about Thrive TRM and all the features it offers to speed up your time to hire and improve your executive search process.