Filling temp jobs can be a true hurdle for companies trying to fill spots during busy seasons. Many go through multiple staffing agencies to get the spots filled quickly, which can be a complicated process and may give you workers that are not all up to your standards. Your company’s growth suffers in the process.
StaffWRX is tackling the $126 billion temporary staffing industry with their machine learning on-demand staffing platform that connects employers and prospective manufacturing and logistics workers with the hourly opportunities that best suit them for maximum retention and productivity. Incorporating in-platform messaging, performance ratings, time reporting, and employee check-in, StaffWRX allows companies to view prospective contractors’ profiles, see who’s available, hire those that match the necessary experience, and monitor their progress. All contractors are W-2 employees of StaffWRX and fully insured.
At the helm of this ATDC signature company are brothers Justin Rainer and Evans Rainer, who saw a gap in the way staffing agencies fill jobs, leaving unsatisfied employers and contractors. Since they launched in January 2016, StaffWRX has filled 529 shifts and seen 10 percent week-over-week growth.
Hypepotamus stopped by StaffWRX’s ATDC space to see how they are improving the temporary staffing market, how their platform can help your company hire better employees, and the challenges they’ve encountered so far.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Evans and I were working in two different industries. I was in logistics and worked with a company that did energy efficiency programs and, as part of those programs, set up about 32 warehouses across the country. Evan was in enterprise IT sales. We noticed a real big need in the staffing industry. There’s roughly about 30,000 staffing companies throughout the country. It’s a huge industry, but very fractured.
One of the things we saw is that no one is very pleased with their staffing provider. There’s a lot of movement among the employees within the staffing companies because they’re not satisfied with the staffing companies that are placing them in jobs.
How did you guys find that gap in the staffing industry?
From personal experience, I got to see this problem in the industry. We had a bell curve of operations in our company; winters were very slow with the increase in production happening from spring through summer, fall, and then you let people go. We had a lot of temporary employment and we always were dissatisfied with the people that we were being provided. We had very low fulfillment rates. We would ask a staffing company to send us ten people. Five might show up. Of those five, one might work to the level that we were hoping they work to and our expectations.
Then, everything that came along with it. We had no accountability of those employees, and I think that’s really where the crux of the problem lie. There was no accountability. You had no reporting. You had no job history of these people. You were just reliant on the staffing company to send you whoever they wanted to send you.
How does StaffWRX solve this problem?
We created a platform that allows for employers to have insight into the process of finding temporary laborers. One of the things we’re focused very much on is the hourly industries. What happens typically in this environment is because you don’t have the ability to select people, you don’t have the ability to communicate with people, so we decided to kind of blow that platform up. Our platform gives employers the ability to set their schedule, tell the marketplace what they need as far as a job description, and then actually go out and see who’s available for that timeframe to work within that industry subset that they’ve selected.
Now the employer can come on, see who’s available from a pool of candidates who we recommend to them based on an algorithm that we use to have predictive knowledge on who would best fit that position. Once the employer selects them, they then have the ability to communicate through in-app messaging and actually call the employee. They have access to their phone number, can call through the app, and then they also get all of the job history from that employee, can go back and reengage that employee at a later date because of the performance that they’ve selected.
StaffWRX mainly targets manual labor jobs, correct? What is your target market?
It’s a double-sided market, right? On one end, we’ve got dissatisfied employees out looking for positions and on the other we’ve got dissatisfied employers, so we really are catering to both sides. Because the employee has the ability to engage directly with the manager — they get a picture of the manager, they know who the manager is — the manager gets the ability to select the employee. Now we’re making a connection that otherwise wouldn’t have been there.
In hourly employment, we’re looking at primarily the warehousing, logistics, and fulfillment centers. That’s kind of our scope right now because they’re the largest consumers of this service. We really wanted to focus in on one sector of it.
What’s your revenue model?
One of the things we wanted to do is keep the revenue model as similar to the staffing industry as possible. We did that purposely because it’s very familiar to a lot of people and there’s not a lot of adoption hurdles that you have to break through. It’s very traditional — it’s an hourly premium on the hourly wage paid to the employee.
Where are you with funding?
We’re bootstrapped right now. We’ve been self-funding and we’re not seeking funding yet. We’re trying to get to a positive cash flow before we do. If we do start looking, it will be to scale outside of the Georgia marketplace as well as grow our team. Everything we’re doing is bringing in more full-time recruiters, upping our development, so we can continue growing and improving on the platform.
Have you encountered any challenges when approaching these companies to adopt your platform?
What traditionally happens is they don’t just have one staffing company. The companies have multiple staffing companies because they know that one staffing company is gonna drop the ball on them. So the hurdle we’ve seen is the fact that they just see us as another staffing company who they know they aren’t going to be satisfied with. We really got to push to get in front of them and give them a demonstration. Every time we do, people are blown away.
We’ve been very successful in picking up new clients, but we’ve been controlling it to make sure that the platform integrity is there before releasing it which at this point we’re now going out to the mass market.
Why build your company in Atlanta?
Georgia is becoming a hub for business, especially the logistics industries. There’s been tremendous growth in fulfillment centers around the metro Atlanta area and Georgia just makes it so easy for companies to do business here. There’s a lot of incentives and we’ve been fortunate to be part of ATDC, which has a tremendous support network. It’s located in an opportunity districts so anyone you hire, you actually get tax incentives for.
We’re Atlanta natives and I think it feels good to help people get jobs, especially jobs where they find rewarding, gainful employment. That’s something that is a big mission of ours as well — how many people can we get to work and help find jobs that they feel good about. I mean anybody that wants to work should work and we’re trying to help provide that platform to do that. Hopefully also help the city in the process.
