Building the workforce of the future

50% of today’s active workforce will hit retirement age in the next decade1, and 85% of blue collar companies reported difficulties in hiring last year2.

There’s a growing shortage of people with the right skills in industries that are essential to our daily life, such as energy, telecomms and construction. Projects rely on skilled workers to build and maintain these critical projects, but sourcing and managing the workforce is a time consuming and expensive process.

A significant portion of this demographic do not have an online presence on platforms such as LinkedIn, and even when they do, their profiles do not provide enough information or documentation to enable a hiring manager to book them without further time spent collecting and verifying information.

How does it work today?

Solving the labour and skills shortage is a major issue for infrastructure companies throughout the supply chain as it threatens to disrupt bidding, build time, and costs. It's a time consuming task with paperwork and intermediaries in the way.

For example:

• Last minute hiring leading to quality issues as verification an on-boarding procedures may be rushed or incomplete
• Hundreds of hours each month spent chasing signatures for documents
• Agency commissions add cost and reduce worker take home pay
• Optimising schedules across multiple stakeholders 
• Invoicing and payment management
• Setting up a labour supply chain in a new location

Optimising the world's infrastructure workforce

We're working towards this vision by first digitising all of the above processes and issues that slow projects down, add uncertainty, and increase costs.

By aggregating supply and demand into one central platform, we can make it easier for people to do business together throughout every stage of the process. Both clients and workers can focus on real work on site, and no longer worry about paperwork getting in the way.

Our current focus is providing a fully verified labour pool to our trial clients, which can be booked on-demand. This removes the need for clients to post jobs on several sites, sift through applications, and verify qualifications and insurance.

At the end of July, we will complete our first testing phase with live trial users in the energy, rail and civil engineering sectors.

Results so far have been promising:

• 30% cost saving versus using local labour agencies
• Zero missed inspections over a 90 day trial period
• Booking times of <1 day when setting up labour in a foreign country
• 95% fewer emails sent to arrange site visits and inspections
• 100% outsourced contractor verification process

What’s next?

We're opening up additional spaces for phase two trials which will start on August 3rd and run for four weeks.

Participants will be the first to test out new features covering digital documentation, scheduling and payments, and the process is free.

To request to join phase two of our trials, leave a comment below or email the team at [email protected].

 References:

1https://www.ibm.com/blogs/industries/how-the-aging-workforce-will-impact-the-eeu-industry/

2https://www.conference-board.org/topics/labor-shortages