Hyperlocal, talent-delivery innovator WorkHere adds human element, increases job-seeker satisfaction and quadruples user growth in second quarter.
Carmel, IN — When you search for a job on a job board, the process is usually dry and impersonal. Not so with Carmel, Indiana-based, WorkHere — winner of the 2018 Techpoint Mira Award for Innovation of the Year. Unlike job boards that use buttons and on-screen forms to help people find a job, WorkHere lets job seekers chat with trained job coaches who help match candidates with the best-fitting, nearby opportunities and help the job seeker prepare to go through the interview and hiring process.
According to Howard Bates, WorkHere CEO and co-founder, “Nobody in the HR Tech space talks to job seekers. Job boards don’t engage at this level. Employers buy bots and applicant tracking systems to run interference. Most of the bots and applicant tracking software is just not suited for this type of engagement. We decided that WorkHere was going to do it differently because right now, qualified, ready-to-start employees are hard to find. Every day we are reaching thousands of workers. We connect them to better jobs with great employers, closer to home. We can even answer a lot of the questions that sometimes prevents an otherwise perfect candidate from applying.”
As a result of WorkHere’s new chat experience, consumer ratings on Facebook have improved from 3.2 stars to 4.8 stars. User growth accelerated from 3,400 new users in April to 10,391 in May. WorkHere reported 10,921 new users in June and is on track for over 16,000 new users in July — a number that puts WorkHere on track to quadruple its user base by the end of 2018. According to Bates, “We’ve also seen a substantial acceleration in sales to employers as well.”
WorkHere’s chat process was created while working with the City of Indianapolis’s Youth Jobs Program, Project Indy. According to Bates, “We started our chat team last year when we realized that talking to Project Indy participants was essential to their success. WorkHere’s mobile app is the engine that connects Indianapolis youth to local jobs!”
After making over 2000 calls, the WorkHere team made a discovery says Bates, “Most of the Project Indy participants thought that if they signed up online, they would magically get a job. That was the moment we decided that providing chat-based coaching was the right thing to do. We were perfectly positioned to give the right advice at the right moment to job seekers. A few months later we were approached to work with Uber, and now we’re chatting with job seekers all over the country.”
The success of WorkHere’s chat team has resulted in changes to WorkHere’s mobile platform. According to WorkHere CTO Rick Wehrle, “We’re building new tools to make a better chat experience for workers and to make our chat team more effective. Our first tool was a chatbot that handles basic questions and helps set up a WorkHere profile for job seekers and frees our chat team up to work on parts of the conversation where bots and AIs are just not able to get the job done. We’re now enhancing our app so that it can be installed on Android and Apple devices without going through the app stores.”
WorkHere is available on the web at workhere.com, on Google Play for Android devices and in the App Store for Apple devices.
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About WorkHere
WorkHere helps workers find better jobs closer to home through our chat enabled, mobile and social app. WorkHere’s chat team is available for free to help job seekers find the right fit and connect directly with hiring managers. For Employers, WorkHere is the leader on hyperlocal candidate delivery. We identify and target candidates, reach out with hyperlocal geo-targeted digital marketing and engage with job seekers in seconds on Facebook, SMS, and WorkHere through our chat team.
Press Inquiries
Mike Seidle, Chief Operating Officer at WorkHere
317-985-9710
mike@workhere.com