FROM FEBRUARY 2014's RECRUITER MAGAZINE

A new recruitment platform that makes use of crowd-sourcing techniques to create a marketplace for recruiters around the world to come together and compete for work has been launched. 

Although US-based, Mike Achilles (pictured left), founder and president of Crowd Recruiting, told Recruiter that it has just introduced the availability to post UK job orders and offers GB pounds currency as commission. “We did this as a direct result of recruiters in the UK asking for it,” he said. “We also had demand in Canada, Australia and from various places around Europe, so we now support five currencies.”

Achilles, a technologist and entrepreneur who has launched two staffing companies in the US as well as an international job board, said he found it difficult to balance the needs for both sales and recruiting each day. Around 80% of job orders would remain unfilled, so he would contact independent recruiters, sourcers, RPOs and other staffing companies to fill them. While this was successful, he was then left with the problem of managing all of the relationships, administration and communication that went with this, which is what the Crowd Recruiting platform seeks to address. “Our focus is recruiters helping recruiters,” he explained, adding: “We want recruiters to come to us as their last resort … we’re working hard to integrate with various applicant tracking systems to allow recruiters to push their job orders to us when they aren’t successful on their own.”

Recruiters can post their job orders to a worldwide network of recruiters and invite competitive proposals to fill the roles. Alternatively, they can set their budget upfront and invite recruiters they know from the network to work on filling the role. “Any recruiter from almost 200 countries can actively recruit on those requirements if they choose,” said Achilles. “In short, Crowd Recruiting provides the ability to create an on-demand recruiting team that can grow or shrink depending on daily needs.”

The platform can also be used by recruiters and agencies that have candidates looking for roles. “An agency recruiter may have a great .net candidate in London but no active job orders. That recruiter can look in Crowd Recruiting to see if any other recruiters are looking for one,” said Achilles.