While Miley Cyrus made a similar sounding word famous for all the wrong reasons, Talent Turking is a different set of moves that allows companies to reduce their Labor Factor, the amount of time and effort necessary to generate viable candidates and fill jobs. Decreasing the Labor Factor is a key move in achieving Lean Recruiting—increasing the speed and accuracy of hiring by maximizing efficiency.

As described in Wikipedia, the Turk (or Mechnical Turk) was a “fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century.” Rather than being driven by some form of special technology, it was “a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. The Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas”

Even though this was an innovation only in spirit, one of the great innovators of our decade, Amazon, has taken this concept and made it real. Their website, www.mturk.com, allows you to hire “Mechanical Turk Workers,” real people who do tasks with machine like speed and cost efficiency.

For anyone involved in recruiting, talent acquisition, or staffing, the applications of this idea are endless. From research to sourcing to database cleanup, these and many more possibilities await, yet, very few people seem to be leveraging this resource.

Keyword searches produced the following results:

• Recruiting – 0 results
• Sourcing – 0 results
• Candidate – 2 results
• Job – 25 results (with only a handful being relevant to hiring)

By turking tasks, more time can be better spent talking with candidates and filling jobs. Even Miley would have to admit that this is the right kind of move for anyone wanting to operate more efficiently.