The pandemic has shown businesses the benefits of flexible staffing from the ability to ramp up or down labor during seasonal periods to reducing fixed costs and increasing flexibility during unforeseen macro events. Coming out of the pandemic, the US has three million fewer Americans participating in the labor force compared to February 2020, prompting the need for tech-forward solutions to better match the limited supply of workers with the growing demand.1
The staffing market is giant, fragmented (no company >2% mkt share), and underpenetrated by technology, with most players employing people-heavy models. Legacy temporary staffing agencies are heavily people-operated. Temp staffing agencies maintain large customer service and account management teams, often manually calling or emailing/texting workers to inform them of shift availability and, on the employer side, exchanging spreadsheets or calls/emails/texts about scheduling, payment and more.
This disjointed and often analog process results in mismatched expectations, frustrating experiences, and suboptimal matching of labor supply and demand, worsened by high turnover and frequency of hiring. An employer running a catering business or warehouse operation, often faces 100%+ full time employee turnover on an annual basis.
Instawork offers a mobile-first job marketplace and workforce management platform for skilled temporary workers, bringing flexible work to hourly workers at scale.
Instawork makes it easy for employers to list shifts and for workers to discover and book them, along with facilitating payment and creating trust with transparent/public performance management for both sides.
Pros have fast access to quality jobs, a transparent booking and payment experience, the ability to build their skills through a two-sided review system, and the capability to receive recognition and rewards for their performance. Instawork offers flexibility that hasn’t previously been offered to Pros; they can set their own hours and can change their work preferences each day, week or month as well as earn more for urgent requests and peak times.
The value proposition to partners is reliability, quality, and convenience. The underlying data model plays a critical role in properly matching skilled workers to available shifts and the performance of both the partner and worker is tracked for future matching success.
The flywheel is working: fill rates (% of positions listed that are filled) have increased over time and no show rates have decreased over time with scale, demonstrating how Instawork’s data-fueled matching system has funneled increasingly reliable and quality workers to employers, resulting in high satisfaction from employers and workers. To date more than4M Pros have joined the Instawork platform and partners are increasingly pulling the company into new geos across the US and Canada.
Our partnership with Instawork
We’re thrilled to announce that TCV has led Instawork’s Series D. In this round, Instawork has raised $60M of capital from TCV and other investors including Benchmark, Spark, Greylock, Craft, 9Yards and more.
We have a deep belief at TCV that strong and fitting company cultures result in great experiences for customers. While learning about Instawork, we heard that the team had a saying “Inches off at launch means miles off in orbit.” It’s exactly this detail orientation and product obsession that we think can give rise to a novel marketplace platform for hourly work. We’re incredibly excited to partner with Sumir and the rest of the Instawork team on their mission to shape the future of work.
1https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-labor-shortage
