I think this sort of thing would work better as structure residents.

Take a look at STO's Duty Officer system. It's basically a completely separate system that is used as a content creation/alternate industry method.

Essentially, workers that live in "card" form that have various knowledge/stats. You get opportunities for jobs to send these crews on, either dropping them off at a location and coming back later to pick them up, or having them take X hours to attempt Y task for you, with success chances based on how well you match their skills to the job at hand and how well their personalities synergize with each other. When they complete missions, they become better skilled at whatever skills they were using for that mission. They can be injured and killed due to hostile intervention of enemy operatives, captured and pumped for information, and will take time to recover from wounds suffered, or potentially sustain permanent injuries.

This could give additional interesting play to player structures and serve as an alternate driver for people to establish new corp offices. Use corp offices as the "recruiting pool" as the source of these little guys, make them tradable/exchangable, and make them less efficient/more random ways to acquire certain things. They could be responsible for finding certain kinds of escalation sites without doing the first part of the chain (exploration) transitioning PI material types at a loss (trade) as replacements for locator agents (intel) as replacements for research agents (science) and as an alternative source of LP goods (diplomacy) to disrupt/provide intel on the "hireling activities" or PI of other players in a given region, constellation, system, planet, or station (espionage)be directly responsible for finding more/better opportunities for future missions (management) and to be stationed in a target office, structure, system, constellation, or region to defend against hostile teams (security)

Because these mission opportunities are randomized, they're more opportunistic, less directed assets, and create a low level "off grid" pvp metagame of passive hostility between capsuleers directing these teams of agents, capturing them, torturing them for information, holding really good ones ransom, etc.

Like PI, their use is limited to a small number per character, and require significant SP inventment in their management, first for "Hireling management" as the core skill that determines how many you can have "hired" at a time, and then a range of secondary skills, one for each discipline that control the quality, number of the types of jobs you can potentially roll to send them on.

Because they are sourced from corp offices, corps can make public the ones their members don't choose to pick up from the office, or release them to offices, giving players a reason to browse corp offices in various stations, and corps a small source of additional income even if they don't own any structures through passively selling them to other players.

Best thing is, because they're poor ass dirtsiders, they work for peanuts.

Hell, it's not clear that capsuleer-piloted ships have any crew at all (even if the ships allow for crew in non-capsuleer configurations).