THE UNSEEN COSTS OF INSOURCING
Crowdsourcing vs insourcing: which is right for your business? This article isn’t here to give you a simplistic answer. As so often, the answer is: it depends. What are your company’s goals? What kind of resources do you have? What kind of talent is available to your business?
Effective in-house management can deliver good results and high-quality crowdsourcing is an excellent way to meet your business goals. However, insourcing comes at a cost. And it’s not just the cost of sourcing, training, and managing your insourced workforce. That’s only half the story.
For startups, smaller businesses, and firms that really want to accelerate growth, a dollar spent on managing your in-house workforce is a dollar not invested in R&D or marketing or strategy. And that’s just the investment of money. For startups and smaller organizations, the time spent on training and HR functions may be even more limiting. After all, your core team is highly skilled and motivated and very good at what they do. Wasting their time on management and oversight is a serious opportunity cost.
WHEN CHEAP IS TOO COSTLY
We can appreciate that crowdsourcing isn’t just an efficient way of reducing overheads. Done well, it’s also a means of ensuring your in-house talent can focus on what they do best.
Outsourcing enables you to access high-quality talent, who already have the skills you need to manage your projects. There are fewer overheads and you get access to top talent at highly competitive rates, especially if you don’t limit your search to local hiring.
That sounds like the ultimate win-win. However, there is a reason for caution. An outsourced workforce reduces personnel costs, but it shouldn’t be a race to the bottom.
If you source talent that hasn’t been effectively vetted and needs extensive additional training, then you will have to invest time and energy into upskilling your outsourced staff. And if their work is substandard, then there’s a good chance the project will be delayed by countless revisions, creating bottlenecks that impede progress.
And if your talent is not up to the job, and you constantly need to search for new outsourced workers, then you probably would have been better off training in-house employees in the first place.
Fortunately, there’s a better way.
EFFECTIVE CROWDSOURCING THAT DELIVERS RESULTS
At Werkit, we’ve worked hard to come up with an alternative to expensive insourcing that delivers lasting value. It’s crowdsourcing, but probably not as you know it.
We source and train a pool of highly skilled talent that can help manage complex tasks. It’s an effective way to fit the right talent to your projects, with minimal effort on your side.
And best of all, Werkit’s crowdsourced solution doesn’t just enable you to develop your current projects more efficiently. It also means you can scale up rapidly, immediately building a self-managed team that tackles even the largest projects.
After all, ambitious projects, like developing machine learning algorithms or building new training data, involve huge amounts of time-consuming work. And while tedious, that work can only be performed by skilled personnel, who can manage tasks like data labeling quickly and accurately.
Werkit assesses your goals, no matter how ambitious, and matches you to the right talent, at the scale you need.
And that means that, at its best, crowdsourcing is about much more than reducing cost. It’s about seizing opportunities.