Staffing Industry Analysts defines “talent platforms” as digital marketplaces connecting clients and freelance workers. However, there are two subsets of talent platforms. One is “talent platform aggregators,” which help companies access workers through several platforms. The other is “crowdsourcing,” and it’s the Staffing Word of the Week.

SIA’s Lexicon defines crowdsourcing as:

“An online platform model that enables work assignments to get parsed out and performed (often as disaggregated ‘microtasks’) by a far-flung ‘crowd’ of independent workers who perform (paid or otherwise compensated/incented) work at will. Typically, the client of a ‘crowdsourcing’ platform is purchasing ‘an outcome’ (as a service output, not a labor relationship). Crowdsourcing also includes work arrangements where a ‘crowd’ of workers compete or bid against one another to solve problems or tasks, with winner(s) selected and compensated based on the merit of their submissions.”

The Lexicon can be found in the free resources section of SIA’s website.

Examples of crowdsourcing firms include Topcoder, Amazon Mechanical Turk and Gigwalk.