Crowdsourcing In Lieu of Outsourcing

The last couple of decades have seen a trend toward outsourcing versus traditional hiring to meet business needs. Coming out of the Great Recession, there is an even newer concept starting to pick up steam. It’s called crowdsourcing. Why not tap the power of the crowd when you have a specific task that needs a solution?

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach to problem solving. You normally think of handing a task to a specific employee or to a manager who will delegate it to a particular employee. In lieu of that, you can go out and bring in a temp or contract employee or forget the employment model completely and hire an outside firm to do the work. If you want to sell a building, you contract with a real estate agent. If you want to build a building you contract with an architect and general building contractor.

Crowdsourcing works something like contracting with a local firm except that the world is your marketplace. Many tasks like web design, logo design, artwork, article writing, app development and so on don’t require someone located nearby. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer can be done anywhere on Earth. On the network, the home office in Beijing is just as close as the corporate office down the hall.

Isn’t this just another form of outsourcing? It is, but on a micro scale and with interesting payment options. What I’m describing is farming out your tasks to individuals and crowds, not setting up your own shop to get cheaper labor overseas or partnering with a major corporation as a service provider.

When you go out for services locally, you probably start with the Yellow Pages or an online directory equivalent. You pick from who’s available in the area so you can meet with them in person to describe the assignment, write the contract and review the progress & results. When you go out for services online you do lose the ability to press the flesh or get your hand around somebody’s throat - literally. But if you can get comfortable doing business without the physical contact, you open up a world of new opportunities - literally!

The biggest enabler for online contracting or crowdsourcing is having a marketplace were buyers and sellers can meet. It’s a lot less dicey than trying to conduct business in forums and chats. Fortunately there is a very large and established marketplace already available with 6 million members worldwide. It’s called Witmart. They’ve got the resources and the tools that make it easy for service providers and clients to hook up successfully.

Here’s where the crowdsourcing idea comes in. You have the usual option to offer a job on a contract basis where you specify qualifications, negotiate the reward, job content and completion date and then pay upon completion. But you also have the option to make a contest out it. You specify the job and the amount of the reward and let the marketplace have at it. You then pick from best solution or solutions and release the reward to the winner or winners.

Where does the contest approach work best? It’s for things like logo design, business card designs, website design, marketing slogans, promotions, and so on. These jobs need quick solutions, don’t demand a lot of time and effort, and the value of diverse perspectives is an asset.

Contracting is more suitable for bigger jobs that require lots of time and effort, need considerable communication and coordination and have many specific requirements. Often the work is done in stages with payment released based on meeting milestones.

Do you occasionally or regularly need to find someone to build a website, translate documents, develop an iPhone App, promote a brand or come up with a company logo and find it a big hassle? Your life could get a lot easier right now by checking out the freelance marketplace with verified high quality providers at Witmart.

Tech Jobs Come Calling

While the Great Recession drags on, not all sectors are getting hit equally hard. In fact, technology is doing rather well on the jobs front. Employers shed 85,000 positions from November to December of last year. But they added 5,200 tech jobs during the same month. Seems like technology is the place to be.

That doesn’t mean that having technology credentials is guaranteed employment. Just ask anyone working in a factory. U.S. manufacturing was moving out of the country even during the good times. With weakened demand for products, most companies are feeling the pinch and many have responded by laying off people. Even the best employers may have to thin the ranks when survival of the company is at stake.

Aside from the depth of this downturn, there’s really nothing new going on here. Business has always been somewhat cyclical. Some years you can have your pick of several good opportunities. Other years the employment section of the newspaper is bare. But, in general, you are better off with marketable skills in the current technologies than without them. During tough times, companies will tend to keep the people that are essential to delivering the product or service that is core to the business. If they need to bring in outside talent, they’ll be scanning resumes for specific skills that exactly match the job that needs doing. Even as business starts to pick up, employers want to selectively add talent that can be productive immediately. Only in the boom times of full employment will they settle for the best of whatever’s available.

Know what’s really booming right now? Technical and skills training of all types. The trade schools and junior colleges are flooded with students who want to learn everything from computer networking to nursing to welding to truck driving. The junior college nearby recently added a truck driving school and now I see their students driving the big rigs around town. Another community college in a nearby town offers a wind turbine technician program. Talk about preparing for the future jobs!

So, here’s your strategy. If you like technical things and are considering entering a certificate or degree program, I’d enthusiastically encourage you to do so. What the job market will be like on graduation day is always a coin toss. But chances are that if you start a two or four year program now, employment prospects will be better when you are ready to start work than they are at the moment. Even if that timing is off, there will still be some really good jobs that go begging for the right skills and someone willing to go where they are.

You can improve your prospects by investigating what technical fields and what businesses are growing at the same time you are busy learning your lessons. Green energy is almost certainly a growth field. So is health care. E-commerce has been hot for a decade. What’s beyond Web 2.0? You need to know and learn the skills that employers want and will pay for.

How about if you’ve been out of school for a long time or are even between jobs? Find out what skill set companies in your area would hire if they could find someone qualified. Thirty years ago it was people who knew something about microprocessors. I picked up a couple of courses at that community college in town and landed a good engineering job based on having just the right flavor of training at the right time. Somebody needs something accomplished even in this economy. Find out what it is, and if you can fill the requirements with your background plus some specific coursework... there’s your opportunity.

Just the Tech Jobs, Please

Nervous about your job in this shaky economy? Just want to be looking around in case... gulp... the worst happens? Or perhaps you're an employer who wants to selectively, very selectively, add talent that's a perfect match to a specific need. In either case, you don't want to be fooling around with general job sites overcrowded with everybody and every job under the sun. What you want is just tech jobs from JustTechJobs.

JustTechJobs is an IT centric job search portal that is what it says: just tech jobs. When you visit their site, your eye will be immediately drawn to the list of recent tech job listings in the left column. I just took a look and noticed a few striking things right off the bat. First of all, every job on the home page was posted in just the last day or so. There were over 30 separate listings from all over the United States. Some typical job titles include "Mid-Level JAVA Developer", "Web Graphic Designer", "Lotus Notes Administrator", "Data Center Operations - Technician", "Marketing Manager", "Technical Writer", "Project Manager" and "Network Administrator."

If you don't see what you want right off the bat, use the search box to enter job title, keywords, or company name. You can do a search of the entire U.S. or target a particular state. An advanced search feature lets you limit the search to as little as 10 miles from a particular zip code. You can also specify the freshness of postings updated within only the last day up to 90 days, or all of them. Check boxes let you specify full time, part time or freelance/temporary positions.

As a job seeker, you don't need an account to search the listings on JustTechJobs. But if you do register you get additional features, such as email alerts when the job you're looking for is posted on the site. There are also RSS feeds available for jobs, by specialty or by location.

For employers, JustTechJobs offers a low cost 30 day posting with discounts for multiple job listings. Jobs are listed chronologically, so as soon as you get your listing online it pops to the top of the list. You can also make your job a "featured job" for an additional fee so that it appears on the homepage at the top of the listings for an entire week. You'll be able to edit your listing at will, so you can adjust the wording based on the response you're getting from candidates.

Do you need an edge in the job market as a potential employee or employer? If so, then take a couple of minutes and take a look at JustTechJobs - Connecting IT's Best.