A talent acquisition mobile technology is applied successfully to the hourly job market

By Andrew Karpie

About 59 percent of the U.S. workforce today is made up of hourly paid workers, most of whom are in non-professional occupations, including hospitality, retail and other services as well as in manufacturing and logistics. Keeping these jobs filled poses a significant effort and cost for businesses, and finding these jobs is not always easy for the worker, either. Of the technology that has been pumped into the talent supply chain, little, if any, has been geared to the challenges of these businesses and workers — that is, until Jobaline.com.

Launched in late 2012, Kirkland, Wash.-based Jobaline has been working hard to keep a large part of the U.S. workforce bringing home the bacon. Jobaline’s platform makes it easy for businesses to post hourly wage jobs and access filtered, well-qualified candidate, and for the workers to find and apply for jobs. Businesses, workers and investors seem to like what the company is delivering (and even some industrial and commercial contingent staffing companies are taking note). After processing more than 400,000 job applications since then, the company is expanding quickly to serve the top 50 metro areas in the U.S.

Hourly wage workers are not always sitting in front of a computer and are more likely to rely on their mobile phones. Jobaline enables workers to complete job applications via any computer, tablet, smart phone or even via text messaging. The process has proven easy for workers to use. Moreover, the technology is bilingual for Spanish speakers.

The company’s technology applies rules based on the hiring businesses criteria to query and screen candidates automatically to produce only highly qualified candidate “leads.” Businesses do not pay for a job post or for clicks, they only pay $4.95 today for each qualified lead, which includes verified contact information, work history, skill assessment, availability and recorded answers to an automated phone inter- view. All the questions, included in the phone interview are defined by the hiring business recruitment team.

“We are in the business of helping people to get back to work by creating mobile technology that reduces friction and inefficiencies in the process,” says co-founder and CEO Luis Salazar, “and it created a lot of interest in contingent staffing firms as our technology saves them time and money.” A case study of one industrial staffing firm indicates Jobaline produced high quality applicants that proved to be reliable workers. Thanks to savings on advertising and recruiter time, the total sourcing cost per job applicant (with verified contact info and qualified for job) dropped to $5.02 on average and recruiters saved more than two hours per hire.

The Buzz

Keeping more than half the U.S. workforce employed in hourly paid jobs is not an easy task. But Jobaline is making it much easier and more efficient for all involved.

Andrew Karpie is an affiliate analyst at Staffing Industry Analysts. He can be reached at akarpie@staffingindustry.com.