Crowdsourcing is more prevalent in society than one may initially think. Many are familiar with Amazon product reviews and Yelp restaurant reviews – both a form of crowdsourcing. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are platforms where members may quickly assess which subjects are trending amongst friend groups and follower networks – also a form of crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing has Carved A Path into the Workplace
CEORater and Glassdoor (both crowdsourced platforms), enable users to anonymously review CEOs and companies in an effort to bring transparency to the workplace. Instagram has gained traction with a new use case – enabling users to visually assess corporate culture given the platform’s deep trove of image and video content.
Crowdsourcing use cases will become increasingly prevalent as the amount of crowdsourced data increases and commensurately the opportunity to gain insight through basic reporting tools and advanced analytics including Natural Language Processing (“NLP”). Job seekers, managers, senior leadership and corporate boards will have more data – including crowdsourced data – with which to make decisions.
Employees are the most valuable resource as it relates to crowdsourced platforms for prospective job seekers. Who better to post reviews related to corporate culture, career opportunities and senior leadership’s operating style than a company’s employees? Like any other data-related process, the more users that participate (i.e. employee written reviews), the better the quality of the aggregate data. For example, let us assume that “Company XYZ” has 5,000 employees located across offices in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and India. The greater the engagement level amongst XYZ’s employees in terms of posting anonymous reviews, the better the data quality for it will reflect diverse opinions from a variety of cultures, work experiences and functional disciplines. To encourage participation on HR-related crowdsourced platforms it is critical to gain trust amongst users – especially those whom publish to the platform. Therefore, enabling users to anonymously publish reviews is essential.
What may the future bring for HR-related crowdsourced platforms? We believe these platforms will increasingly focus on images and video-based reviews – practices that have become common on the leading social media platforms . In terms of how crowdsourced review data is used, we believe that amongst job seekers the use case will not materially change in the near-term other than user participation across platforms will increase. As the data sets grew they become increasingly attractive to machine-learning platforms which may run sophisticated multivariate unsupervised learning processes in an effort to gain actionable insight.