Kiwi Business Story: Lucas Grossi from Crowd Sourcing

Lucas Grossi is the owner and Managing Director of Crowd Sourcing. Based at The Icehouse’s coworking space in central Auckland, Crowd Sourcing is an innovative IT recruitment company which has developed a unique hiring process.

Location: Auckland  
Number of employees: Four 
Founded: 2018 
Business Type: Technology and Recruitment 
Current Business Situation: Continued post-Covid growth 
Relationship with The Icehouse: Coworking Tenant

What does Crowd Sourcing do?

We provide technology recruitment services for startups, young and scaling-up companies, all of which will be huge in the next few years! We source high-caliber candidates who have the right technical skills as well as the right cultural fit for each business. We’ve designed a sustainable, efficient, quick, and robust system to help companies hire the right people without the burden of traditional recruitment processes.

 
Tell us about your role?

I’m the owner and Managing Director. I came from a corporate recruitment background – very suited and booted. I was desperate to break away from that and asked myself, ‘What else is there?’ and ‘How can we find a way to provide a bit more value than the rest?’ And luckily, it wasn't too hard!
 

How does 2022 look for the business compared to 2021?

Covid did have an impact. A lot of clients were mid-way through the hiring process and every company we worked with put an instant freeze on their recruitment strategies. That had me looking deep within myself asking, ‘Is this really happening?’  

We didn’t stand still and got on with it. Technology, IT, and software engineering are probably the best industries for lockdowns, as they help homeworking and remote office work. All the companies we work with were tracking well anyway, so they just moved on from that and now I'm trying to help these companies double and triple their teams. That's the mission here.

What are the current challenges facing the business? 

We’re a small team of four people – three recruiters plus one admin person – and there’s a lot of that in this business, so our major challenge is just enabling ourselves to do what we do best, which is understanding a team's or company's requirements and just connecting that message to the right audience in the market.

One enormous difference for us is that we don't work with a huge portfolio of companies, and we don't want to work with a lot of companies. Our model is based on devoting ourselves to getting to know, learn and understand the few businesses that we do work with.

I came from an environment where I was responsible for the recruitment of around 150 different organisations. It’s impossible to get to know and do quality work for so many people. The companies that we work with tend to go from zero to a lot of people quite quickly. We hire the first engineer, then the 50th, and 70th, by building special relationships with our clients.  

A good example of that is Tradify. They were based at The Icehouse eight years ago – a little pod of three or four, so I have followed them on their huge growth journey from the beginning. 

We placed their second engineer there. That person is now software engineering manager and between them and today, we’ve placed 40-odd people through Tradify.  

How did you become a coworking tenant at The Icehouse?

Apart from working with Tradify, I met Clinton Geissler at an event – when he was at Icehouse Ventures. We got talking and I started doing drop-in sessions and office-hour consultancy at The Icehouse. That was four years ago!

Founders, CTO and CEOs would always ask me how the market was doing or where could they find a software engineer? I realised that many of these young businesspeople needed help designing an interview process, guidance on what questions to ask, and so on.  

We did amazing work for one amazing company. That became more regular – helping more entrepreneurs with all aspects of their recruitment. It became clear that many of these owners were looking for something more than just another candidate, and a lot more interaction was required to get the right person, so I got to know The Icehouse space very well.

The Icehouse is like a family. We now work with predominantly Icehouse Ventures-backed companies, so there’s a great fit there.  
 

And now you're a coworking tenant? 

Early this year I decided to move in! After four years it’s now official! From day one Natasha [Burton, Community Lead] and Simon [Rogers, Operations Executive] were so welcoming and will do anything to help. We’re not just tenants to them. You can tell that they really want every business here to succeed and grow and do the best that they can. They are invested in our success. 

Two of the team live close by. I’m in West Auckland so we work Monday to Wednesday from home and come into the office on Thursday and Friday. Partly it’s to see each other, but it’s also to enjoy the network. It’s a great vehicle for us to connect with like-minded people, candidates, and clients.

There are events and keynotes and everything that happens here is relevant and interesting for us. We all benefit from the interactions and connections, and it's just very nurturing for my team to be here. 

Parnell is a tech hub anyway, which is another reason why The Icehouse is perfect for us. The key people that we need to be close to conduct their businesses here. 

The infrastructure here is great but so is the culture. Good things happen here so for me as a business owner, to have good chats with great people over shared lunches and fantastic coffee machines is super-positive – and the team quite enjoy it as well!

Follow the link for more information about Crowd Sourcing and how it supports apprentices.

Click on the link to find out more about coworking at The Icehouse.