In November, we introduced Workfast, a new temp agency that promises to make hiring temps as effortless as booking an Uber. Inside Construction was intrigued and decided to get the low down on how the company is intending to shake up the industry.
The story began when Workfast CEO Tim Nieuwenhaus, a business owner, found that staff not showing up to work was a huge ongoing problem that unsurprisingly impacted both the productivity of the business and morale of his staff.
All he wanted was an easy process to find temporary workers to fill a spot, be it for an hour, a day, a week or a month, and he wanted a fast and automated process to do that.
After a year of building Workfast’s platform, Nieuwenhaus says the “technology is 90% of the way there”.
And in the last two months, the company has booked an impressive $1 million worth of ongoing business, with Nieuwenhaus noting that the construction sector accounts for some 40% of its business at the moment.
How Workfast intends to disrupt the industry
At the moment, a number of temp staff and labour hire agencies rely on paper-based systems, which includes the trusty Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
“But from where I came from, selling clothes online and online advertising, this is unheard of,” Nieuwenhaus told Inside Construction.
“The Workfast process a much easier way of doing it, it’s much more automated. It reduces cost. We can save companies 15%-30% on staffing. It’s a huge advantage to switch.”
Essentially, there are no listing, success, or sign-up fees associated with the Workfast service. All companies have to do is post a job on the platform, choose a suitable worker, and negotiate a price based on experience and ratings. The whole process can be completed in less than 15 minutes and companies can either manage the entire hiring process on their own or have Workfast do it for them. More on the process here.
“Companies can call us and discuss their needs with us. We’ll train them and show them how to use the applications or we manage the applications for them on their behalf so they don’t actually have to do anything. And they still get the cost savings in using our service,” Nieuwenhaus explained.
“This goes from posting the jobs up through to the applications and hiring the workers. If they don’t want to use the application, we can just use it on their behalf. They benefit either way. We know they’re busy and they can just ring us and say we need 10 staff next week starting Monday and we can just do that whole process for them.
“It’s a technical solution to their current problems – collating staff information and times and workplace information or staff information and just automating the whole process. It’s just basically taking a whole ecosystem of labour hire and labour workforce and automating it.”
Workfast also wants to take it one step further by automating other aspects of the HR process. The final bit of the puzzle will comprise the automation of long and short-term contracts, timesheets, payslips, and invoices.
“So we’re going to have a holistic solution for the whole HR process in running staff. We’re also going to have automated taxation, Pay As You Go, and super withholding. We’re going to build that all into the system. It’s going to be quite complex and the solution is quite hard to build but it’s going to be comprehensive,” Nieuwenhaus said.
“In a year or two, this will be commonplace. Lots of people will hear about it, the industry will start changing and people will start catching up.”
A fast, simple and reliable system
Over in the ACT, solar company Eco For Life has only just finished constructing a large solar farm in Williamsdale, Canberra.
The pressure was on near the end of the project, when the company had to meet a fast approaching deadline but was short on temp construction staff. According to Eco for Life, the other employment agencies were unable to provide the number of temp workers the company needed in a hurry so it turned to Workfast.
“They were struggling with the workforce that they had currently, and the current labour hire agencies, and we provided 30 staff within a week for them on an ongoing basis until the project finished. The whole process and the way we do it is much faster and they’ve saved about 20-30% of their current staffing,” Nieuwenhaus said.
Eco for Life accountant Carmel Box told Inside Construction the fact that Workfast was “very quick to act” was pleasing.
“They were very quick. And it was very easy and simple to fill in the forms and get it back and there was just no problem. There didn’t seem to be a lot of to-ing and fro-ing as we had with other agencies. They just asked all of the questions they needed, got the answers and off they went,” Box said.
“They asked what qualifications the employees needed, anything else that they needed to bring of their own, what the work was that was required, and that’s about it.”
Box said her directors who were managing the project only had good things to say about the company, highlighting that the temp workers they hired were good and reliable.
“Workfast would be the first one I’d go to [for future projects] and there was definitely cost savings because the administration of our company was off-site so the directors running the project would have had to do all the chasing around and interviewing on their own, which would have taken a lot of time away from what they were doing for the project,” she added.
“The company is very helpful and easy to deal with.”
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