The Unintended Consequence of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing began as a way to solve huge challenges, such as mapping the human genome. The theory behind Crowdsourcing is that of course a giant pool of talented individuals, when properly motivated and measured, can far out produce any company's internal team. The internal team simply doesn't have the bandwidth and suffers from too many Single Points of Failure whereas a precisely managed crowd always has someone of talent to do the required work. The net results of companies leveraging large communities (that get it right) are lowered costs, higher quality, and shorter time to market for their product or service.

A shining example of exactly that is TopCoder. With a robust community of over 200,000 software developers and graphics gurus, TopCoder hosts global software competitions for their many enterprise clients and delivers back amazing product, cheaper, and in a shorter time frame. That's what Crowdsourcing was built for right?

Well, things have changed. Now, Crowdsourcing is having a second coming, a 2.0 of itself if you will, and this time it is ALL about viral and social proliferation. Today's example highlights a few Brits with a mission and a community behind them. Watch the incredible YouTube story and video here: ChartJackers - I've Got Nothing

The point of all this is that Crowdsourcing is evolving before our very eyes, and the new vertical, the new opportunity for all to explore is the fine balance between the output of the crowd, the quality of the production from the crowd that is, AND the social media proliferation a Crowdsourced project can innately provide. Companies/Brands that can strike this balance and produce gems via the crowd (whatever they are producing) WHILE getting the average community member to turn into a full on advocate of the project will have gigantic success.

It's happening in the most unlikely of places. ChumBonus, is a Crowdsourced recruitment engine and quite a disruptive model that is looking to prove that YOU and all of your professional and personal connections can not only supplant, but easily surpass the archaic ways companies recruit and search for talent.

Employers pay nothing in their system to list their career opportunities (Unlike Monster or CareerBuilder), meaning ChumBonus is a complete meritocracy. Employers pay upon a successful hire and pay far, far less than leveraging traditional recruitment means.

The other end of their engine is YOU and all of your connections. You browse the job openings and refer individuals you feel are qualified. If your candidate lands the job, YOU get paid a "Chum Bonus" and it's not a small bit of money (typically around $1,000 to $1,500). Toss in the fact as YOU receive your "Chum Bonus" (for a successful hire) you are asked then and there what % of your "bonus" you would care to donate to a litany of amazingly powerful charities. Yup, they seamlessly baked in social good too.

As new jobs hit their engine, YOU refer the talented folks you know or at least proliferate the job opening by sharing it with your social graph. ChumBonus is banking that this tactful blend of Crowdsourcing output and Crowdsourcing social proliferation will lead to an amazingly efficient and engaging recruitment engine where the crowd not only does the dishes, but they hand out the flyers to get you in the joint too.

Welcome to Crowdsourcing 2.0 ... Monster and CareerBuilder, you have been warned.