Air Miles, Conferences & the Apprentice

The past few weeks have been incredibly busy as we steam along getting ever closer to launch. Meetings with investors and potential partners, a trip to South Africa to touch base with our development team, signing up users, getting the bank account set up etc. etc. etc. have been filling up our days. It’s all incredibly exciting, very rewarding, and a little daunting. WorkMatch is coming together.

We were selected to pitch at the Emerge Social Impact conference at Oxford’s Said Business School as part of the Mustard Seed (a London based VC) competition-- it was great fun and a brilliant experience. We presented alongside seven other superb  teams with some super innovative ideas-- an ‘AirBnb’ for accommodation suitable for less physically-abled people, a South African company tackling early childhood education through laundry centres, and a woman helping refugees in Jordan to find jobs. WorkMatch was very well received, and we got a lot of great feedback about the concept, our identification of the hospitality industry’s ‘pain points’ and solutions presented to them, and about WorkMatch’s potential social impact, giving people at the lower end of the economy control of their working lives whilst providing employers with a superior solution.

Developing our pitch for the conference made us concentrate on the nature of the sharing economy, the way people fit into it, how things might be different, and what WorkMatch can do to improve the way the labour market works for employees, and employers. We are creating a platform that will give people in the informal economy complete control of their working lives. That enables people’s skills to be valued, and transferred; where flexibility is the norm, in an equitable relationship between employers and employees. We live in the era of the collaborative economy; of ecosystems built around the sharing of human and physical resources. The potential for fundamental economic change is immense, and technology has a huge role, indeed if not the lead role, to play in that. In developing the WorkMatch concept and designing our platform, a key fact that informed our thinking is that in a ‘post-crash’ world of austerity, a hard truth is that not everybody shares in the sharing economy. And this is a global phenomenon. There are aspects of labour markets where the employer-employee relationship is skewed. This is bad for workers, bad for employers and bad for society. With WorkMatch we intend to shed light on the shadow economy, making this aspect of the labour market more equitable, and more efficient.

A final highlight was catching up with our good friend Vana Koutsomitis. She’s currently a contestant on BBC 1’s The Apprentice, and is doing exceptionally well! Her latest escapade, Vino by Vana, is an exciting project making wine less stuffy and more appealing to a broader market. Perhaps it will be on tap at the WorkMatch offices one day.

TeamWorkMatch

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