Earlier this week I learned about a marketing campaign and job opportunity that the Murphey-Goode wine company is running. Basically, the winery is looking for a social media blogger who will spend the next six months reporting on all things wine around the vineyard, here’s the job description. Instead of using a traditional recruiting approach they’ve put a competition online where candidates can submit a one-minute video explaining why they should get the job. It’s crowdsourced recruting.

This is an image from their micro-site www.areallygoodjob.com, where you can watch the video pitches and vote on them. After checking out the site, I’ve got some mixed feelings:

Feeling #1: Happy

As a marketing 2.0 kinda guy, I appreciate the fact that this winery has found a way to crowdsource recruiting. I’ve been watching how crowdsourcing has been affecting marketing, and how it fits well with a community engagement approach. Today, big companies like Proctor and Gamble are restructured to leverage communities effectively in the name of innovation. And, younger organizations like Threadless have built business models around crowdsourcing. This is exciting because it’s evolving product development models to be more customer centered.

Feeling #2: Concern

With structural change some things get left by the wayside. This winery story puts a spotlight on the recruiting industry. which is literally changing before our eyes (granted the economy has also fueled the shift to services like LinkedIn).The question is, do recruiters offer some value that is getting lost?

Feeling #3: Patience

Along with the structural change you’re also bound to get some over-zealous applications of the new idea. Crowdsourcing is clearly not going to be effective for every kind of challenge but one way we establish the areas in which it is effective is by applying it across a wide range of situations.

Your feelings?
Having watched a bunch of the submissions, I started to feel like they’ve turned merit-based recruiting into an uninspiring popularity contest. That bugs me a little bit, though technically it’s only the top 50 candidates that are selected by the crowd. Have you watched any of the submissions? What’s your take?