“Wow! It’s Really Fast.”
How a New App Changes the Recruiting Process in Denmark

Evgenia Bereziuk
“Wow! It’s Really Fast.” How a New App Changes the Recruiting Process in Denmark
The revolution in recruitment has already happened. Experts all over the word predict that most, if not all, HR resources will be app-based in the near future. More recruiting apps exist today than ever before. That trend will only accelerate in 2019 as more developers try to put structure around recruiting and HR processes.
The Workee team launched their app for hiring blue-collar staff in Denmark in 2017. Now more than 900 registered companies and about 20,000 candidates are active Workee users. The members of Workee have shared their story and told how the companies, HR departments and employees describe their experience of using a new app instead of old-school tools.

“If you a man – write me. I’ve got a job for you.”

“Recruiting manual labor workers, blue-collars, is different from recruiting white-collars, who are usually hired through recruiting agencies and job sites,” explains Evgenia Bereziuk, CMO at Workee. “In most cases, companies share their vacancies on Facebook or print the info about their openings and put it on the doors of their restaurants and shops. Of course, it is possible to find employees this way, but if you want to close your vacancy as fast as possible, this will never do. For example, our experience of hiring on Facebook showed that most of the applicants either don’t live in Denmark, or don’t read the requirements in the vacancy.”

“Some companies take a creative approach to hiring. For example, I saw balloons with the inscription ‘Looking for salesman’ launched into the sky and recently I came across a post on Facebook where a businesswoman published her hot photo with the caption ‘If you a man – write me. I’ve got a job for you’,” continues Evgenia. “That is funny and doesn’t cost anything, but is it also effective? Being a blue-collar or a manual labor worker is not the same as being a low-skilled employee. A top-ranked specialist will not run after a balloon and won’t pay attention to a hot photo of a potential employer.”

Advantage №1. Simplicity

In 2016, Workee team members were working for international IT company CactusSoft, which has strong expertise around the Digital Workplace and is headed by Vera Reshetina. The company had been developing and implementing complicated enterprise HR solutions and had also developed and launched its own mobile application for onboarding and engagement in Europe and the USA.

“Our next challenge was to create a simple and effective recruitment solution which would help companies to hire blue-collars as fast as possible, not within a couple of days but within a couple of hours,” says Vera Reshetina, CEO of Workee. “For example, today is a bargain sale in a shop and a sales assistant has been taken sick; or there is a banquet in a restaurant and a waiter can’t come to work and you urgently need a substitute employee. We wanted to create a tool that would help companies to close their hot vacancies quickly and develop a candidate base that would be at hand all the time.”

According to the Internet Trends Report 2018 by Kleiner Perkins, in 2017 an average mobile user spent 3.3 hours per day with a mobile phone receiving information of different types, compared with 2008 when this number was much lower – 0.3 hours per day. In nine years, this indicator grew by 1100%.

“At present, the majority of employees are represented by millennials and they use mobile phones more often than computers. We took this fact into account and focused on creating a mobile app,” says Vera Reshetina. “One more thing: we understood that HR professionals, managers and business owners are busy people. They need products that are simple, easy to use, and most importantly save their time! Time-saving is probably the best feature any vendor can build into the product. If a recruitment app doesn’t make the HR department’s job easier, you should think twice about adding it to the list of tools your company uses.”

That is why the main characteristic of Workee is simplicity. A company can create a profile within a few clicks and a vacancy description can contain 200 symbols at most.

“And it works! We’ve noticed that at the beginning companies used to write long texts describing their positions, but now they use only a few phrases like ‘Cook needed, familiar with Danish and modern cuisine’ or ‘Looking for a baker to work independently from 8 to 12 a.m.’.”

People who are not tech-savvy like the simplicity of the app, but they are not the only ones. Millennials are a Twitter generation. They are people who absorb a huge amount of information, but whose comprehension is best when the info is structured and divided into short pieces of text, like on Twitter or Facebook. Using Workee doesn’t require candidates to make huge CVs – you just need to upload your photo, add info about your education and previous experience and also indicate your preferred shifts – day, night, weekend. Then you’re ready to apply!

Advantage №2. Location filter

Workee was launched in May 2017. The core idea of the app is that it shows search results based on your location. According to recent research, this is important for both candidates and employers – between 2015 and 2017, the use of the internet query “near me” grew by 900%.

“A couple of months after the launch, we received a message from a girl who came to Denmark from Bulgaria and found a job for her and her friend as flyer distributors. After that, another young man from Roskilde wrote to tell us that with the help of Workee he had found his first ever job and had become a waiter in a café. That was fantastic – the app really worked!” says Evgenia Bereziuk. “One of the most inspiring pieces of feedback was from the owner of a small business. He wrote: ‘Wow! It’s really fast for hiring’. That was what we’ve been dreaming about.”

The Workee team admits that not all of the feedback was positive.

“There were small business owners who tried Workee and then told us that it’s still more convenient for them to use printed job ads because they’re accustomed to recruiting like that. We think that’s okay,” says Evgenia. “At the end of the day, every business has its own speed. But at the same time, we can see that a great number of HR professionals and business owners are hungry for best practices and appreciate the value and benefits that new HR tech brings.”

Advantage №3. Workee is a free app for both companies and candidates.

Both companies and employees use Workee free of charge.

“That is the most obvious thing – to launch a product for which people using it will pay money at once. But our goal now is to make our app a tool to change the way you hire and make it more efficient. We want Workee to simplify a problem for both companies and candidates and make the hiring process quick and not stressful. That is why at the moment we collect feedback from Workee users and improve our product.”

In today’s era of new competencies and approaches, there is no doubt that in order to come out at the top, HR departments will need to craft effective combinations of traditional and digital approaches.

“And we, the Workee team, are here for those who leave their assumptions aside and open their minds to agile learning about how technology disrupts and will continue to disrupt recruiting,” sums up Vera Reshetina.