On-demand labor is becoming more prevalent in a range of sectors, including transportation, hospitality, home services and short-term project-based assignments. By the end of 2023 there will be 78 million gig workers in the US alone. Both employers and workers benefit from the flexibility and scale that on-demand labor offers. To meet this demand, tech-enabled labor marketplaces have entered the staffing industry. By using mobile apps to connect workers with on-demand jobs in their area, these marketplaces have been transformative to the landscape of hourly and shift work.
Tech-enabled labor marketplaces give companies the ability to hire teams on short notice without making a single phone call. While technology allows companies to find local talent quickly, the quality of talent can still be of concern. High quality placements lead to improved ability to fill available roles and fewer no shows when workers are matched with those available roles.
Accordingly, on-demand staffing platforms and traditional staffing companies track fill rates as a key metric toward measuring operational performance.
How Gig Work Platforms Measure Success
Measurement and metrics are essential for on-demand staffing platforms as they enable performance evaluation, quality control, resource optimization, cost management, continuous improvement, and accountability. By leveraging data-driven insights, employers can make informed decisions, optimize operations, enhance service quality, and drive the success of on-demand labor initiatives.
Of all metrics, data points related to filling job vacancies are most indicative of a healthy business relationship between the employer and the labor marketplace. All stakeholders should be on the same page regarding how quickly employees are matched with employers. From the time an on-demand assignment is accepted to the time the worker clocks out, employers expect to know that a particular task will be completed. For this reason, the fill rate is one of the most tracked metrics by companies that use on-demand labor.
How to Avoid Gig Worker Attendance Issues With Better Fill Rates
Low fill rates are detrimental to the growth and profitability of businesses in the on-demand labor space. Unfilled assignments cause customer churn as employers will not have confidence that gig workers will arrive in time to satisfy on-demand job requirements.
In order to avoid low fill rates, companies rigorously screen workers and create ample opportunities for workers to notify managers of their location, availability, and shift preference. Some companies are implementing technology to allow workers to share their location with managers at job sites, with some teams even building tools to automatically notify managers when a worker us en-route to an assignment on-time.
HyperTrack and Gig Worker Attendance - A Case Study
HyperTrack provides APIs to automate your on-demand jobs and workforce and improve KPIs.
To illustrate how HyperTrack can improve processes in the on-demand job context, let’s consider the example of a US-based on-demand labor marketplace. The business faced an issue where gig workers booked through their platform did not show up for the job in some instances. This eroded trust with the enterprises that booked the workers and necessitated refunds when there was no recourse. Most labor marketplaces face similar problems wherein gig worker attendance issues and no shows in particular present an unpredictable risk.
The business realized that knowing the live location of gig workers could inform operations teams as to whether workers were avaliable and able to accept gigs in their area, and arrive at those gigs as expected. This prompted leadership to incorporate live location into their tech stack. Exploring the market, they found a lot of applications that provided driver apps and operational dashboards to track live location of drivers.
However, as fully packaged applications these solutions could not integrate the driver experience, operational experience and customer experience the business had already built. For instance, using off the shelf solutions meant the marketplace drivers needed to install a second app for live tracking in addition to the app used to accept and manage their gigs. Similarly, operations managers would need to have multiple applications to manage the day to day activities of the business.
Using Location Data to Improve Gig Worker Attendance
This led the business to explore building the solution using Android, iOS, Map and cloud technologies. However this snowballed into a mammoth long term project requiring engineers with expertise in Android/iOS location tech, battery optimization, cloud technology to manage the billions of location events generated by driver devices, mapping technology to display drivers on the map and generate ETAs, delays, and other critical real-time data. Investing multiple engineers for years to solve this problem would distract the business from building other features that were important to their customers.
The search led the business to HyperTrack. Through solutioning discussions it was clear the key KPI that the business was tracking was the fill rate which was in the double digit percentages for certain job segments. Further, as a tech first company, they were obsessed with the experience of their drivers, operations managers and end-customers which made it necessary to only consider solutions that enhanced these experiences in their ecosystem that had already been built.
Building a Customized Gig Worker App
To improve fill rates, the businesses needed to track their gig worker’s progress leading up to the gig start time. They needed to do this sufficiently in advance so in case the gig worker was not expected to reach, they could set the right customer expectation or find a replacement. Further, the ability to connect with workers and find replacements was highly dependent on the type of skill set being hired and the tenure and prior behavior of the worker. Newly hired workers needed closer monitoring to reduce risks. All this meant heavy customization in how different gigs needed to be tracked. Further, the tracking needed to be shared with the internal operations team as well as the end customers to reduce manual communication.
The business found the HyperTrack mobile SDK, Orders API, Drivers API, webhooks, operational views and consumer shareable views, gave them full flexibility to build a highly customized workflow for each of their gigs.
They integrated the HyperTrack mobile SDK in their driver app and onboarded drivers via the Driver API.
To track gigs, they used HyperTrack’s Orders API which orchestrated the workflow to start tracking the driver’s phone and generate ETAs for the order destination. The time to start tracking was tailored based on the type of worker, their start location and type of gig to allow enough time to find replacement drivers if needed.
When order tracking started, HyperTrack’s webhooks allowed them to monitor order risks when workers were not moving or not expected to be at the gig location on time. Based on webhooks, their fulfillment management system automatically kicked off workflows to communicate to the existing worker and find a replacement if needed.
Further, the gig workers' progress on the map was embedded in the operational dashboard so their ops team immediately knew where the worker was without having to call them.
The integration with HyperTrack was completed within days, cutting their time to market and engineering investment by over 90% relative to building the tech inhouse from scratch. Through the automated workflow they reduced their no-show rates to low single digits and even in those cases were able to proactively manage customer expectations which improved trust.
This is one example of how HyperTrack helps companies leverage location data to improve the performance of labor and workforce operations.
Learn More about HyperTrack
HyperTrack provides the building blocks to automate on-demand jobs and workforce for hourly and shift labor, field service, field sales, and delivery. Our order APIs for planning, assignment, tracking, and verification learn from ground truth data to improve operations KPIs. Customers across all inhabited continents use HyperTrack’s comprehensive suite of APIs, SDKs, and webhooks to build solutions integrating mobile,maps, and cloud. Start building with the free trial at https://hypertrack.com/.
