Snag a Job, Snag a Shift
Today Snagajob announced the acquisition of Charleston-based PeopleMatter, giving the combined entity a foothold in over 250,000 retail, hospitality and foodservice locations. This announcement comes just 4 months after securing a $100M round of funding earlier this year. According to Snagajob CEO Peter Harrison, this accelerates their vision of being the one-stop shop to “snag a job and snag a shift.”
If you’re not familiar, PeopleMatter had built – both organically and via acquisition – a solution uniquely targeted at the hourly service market. In that fast paced world, their combination of hiring, assessment, learning and scheduling made perfect sense. You need to hire the best fit people using a data-driven approach, train and get them up to speed quickly, and deploy them to get work done. Given the nearly one million new users a month that join Snagajob and share their skills and shift availability, expanding their capability to not just hire but onboard and schedule workers is a logical extension.
Harrison’s vision also includes letting people staff across brands. For example, a worker qualified to work at one Subway can work at another, even if it’s owned by another franchisee. PeopleMatter’s technology already allowed for visibility across multiple locations. And this could ultimately evolve into a technology-enabled service where a slate of “ready to work” employees show up, having already been qualified against skill requirements, team fit, and schedule availability. PeopleMatter’s acquisition of PeopleClues in 2013 brought a powerful assessment capability to the offering, which it sounds like Snagajob will continue to build on, helping to accurately match people to jobs, organizations and teams.
This acquisition is also an interesting potential disruption in the workforce management space. It could be called the “Uber-ization” of the hourly workforce. I’ve have written several places about the possible role other traditional workforce management providers may play in the evolving gig economy. But for the retail, hospitality and foodservice vertical, this is an interesting move. I have often said in a salaried environment, talent acquisition and succession answer the same question – where’s my next top performer coming from? But that question operates on a longer time horizon. In the high-turnover hourly market, it would seem talent acquisition and scheduling answer the same question – who’s going to work my next shift?
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