In our era of on-demand work, whether its ride-sharing to food delivery, low unemployment makes hiring even more onerous for employers across the board. For those in the restaurant business, hiring becomes more difficult as staffing demands are more variable and less predictable than other professions. Desmond Lim, 33, Max Wang, 31, and Lei Xu, 29, knows this first hand as a former restaurant owner, and created Workstream in 2017 as a solution. Workstream is a staffing startup focused on automating hiring and onboarding for businesses employing hourly workers. The San Francisco-based startup has completed a seed fundraising round, raising from Basis Set Ventures and Heartland Ventures.
A significant pain point is the ability of companies to recruit and retain employees effectively. The turnover rate for hourly workers is often orders of magnitude higher than the yearly turnover rate for office workers. For example, the restaurant industry has anastronomical rate of turnoverwith an average churn of around 73%, (1.5x the industry averageof 46% for all private-sector workers and multiples higher than the annual 10-20% tech worker turnover).
To help solve this issue, Workstream has developed platforms to help source, screen, hire and onboard employees efficiently as companies grow. With a focus on hourly workers, Workstream combines AI and text messaging to hire workers four times faster than other methods, says Basis Set Ventures Lan Xuezhao.
Workstream cofounder Desmond Lim.
The hiring needs of small-to-medium-sized businesses can vary significantly because of the current demand they are trying to serve. For business owners employing in the hospitality industry, the problem of adequate staffing can be severe. Lim and his family have experienced this issue first hand as owners and employees. His parents were hourly workers. Lims father was a driver, and his mother assisted her spouse. Lim himself started his first business in the restaurant industry. He owned and operated a Thai restaurant, Treehouse Caf. At Treehouse, as part of the primary operations, Lim had to manage screening, hiring and onboarding, new workers, in a manual fashion. People apply through online job portals but may not show up for an interview. If they are hired, they may not show up on time or at all for training because they miss reminders via phone or email.
Lim wasnt the only one to deal with the challenges of hiring hourly workers during his time as a restaurateur (he later sold the business). TheNational Retail Foundation predicted $3.8 trillionin retail sales in 2019, which reflects 3.8% to 4.4% year over year growth. The growth of sales leads to a growth in jobs in the retail sector. The same can be said for the restaurant sector as well. TheNational Restaurant Association predicts $863 billionin 2019 sales for all U.S. restaurants and the addition of 1.6 million jobs by 2029. The growth of these jobs directly drives the needs for better hiring and onboarding platforms to help retailers better serve their customers at large volumes of sales.
Workstreams core product is a hiring automation platform built for hourly workers. Lim and his team found that the major bottleneck is in sourcing and hiring hourly workers, given theU.S. unemployment rate is at an all 50 year low. Workstream sends text messages to the applicant to make sure applicants proceed through the hiring process successfully. The texts sent include a link to a form to help capture information to move them forward in their candidacy for the job. The startup has found that their clients, some of whom are Jamba Juice, Subway, and Sports Basement, have increased their conversion rate of candidates to employees threefold while decreasing the time needed to screen and onboard them by half. The startups ability to serve its current clients well comes from a strong founding team.
Lim, Wang, and Xu all have one thing in common. They are all immigrant founders who came from different regions of the world. Lim, hailing from Singapore, studied at Harvard for his Masters in Public Policy. Aside from his restaurant business, Lim had previously worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as an investment banker, WeChat as a product manager, and as a founder of QuikForce, an on-demand logistics startup. Wang, coming from China, obtained his Masters from Cornell Tech in Computer Engineering. Wang was previously a software engineer at Sinovation Ventures and a founder of a China-based startup before co-founding Workstream. Xu, also born in China, studied Industrial Engineering and Economics at U.C. Berkeley and previously founded a YC-backed (S16) ed-tech startup called Emote. For many hourly workers, these threes efforts through Workstream will help them find the jobs they need to thrive in todays and tomorrows economy.
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Workstream, A Staffing Automation Startup, Helps Small Businesses Hire Hourly Workers - Forbes
