Mike Shebat

Top 50 leaders shaping the gig economy
Mike Shebat
CEO & Co-Founder
Traba

Traba is a marketplace that connects light industrial workers with businesses to fill open shifts. We focus on opportunities in warehousing, distribution, and event staffing.

The Origin Story

The idea for Traba was born from co-founder Mike Shebat’s experience as a warehouse supervisor. While in a management rotation program at McMaster Carr, managing a distribution center in LA, Mike experienced firsthand the inefficiency of the state of flexible staffing. McMaster Carr experienced fluctuations in customer demand, when they had increased orders, Mike would need to enlist four or five different traditional staffing agencies to quickly hire the workers he needed.

Placement lead time could be up to a week, fill rates hovered around 50%, and worker quality was hit or miss. Workers would often churn within a couple of weeks because there wasn't much loyalty to the staffing agency. And there was very little transparency about how well they completed the work that they would be doing.

After Mcmaster Carr, Mike joined Uber as one of the founding members of Uber Eats, in his time launching new cities in the US and Latin America, he wondered how a seamless technology solution could revolutionize an entire industry and provide a more flexible and transparent way for workers to earn a living. The idea for Traba was born.

What’s Unique

Traba matches workers with open shifts in the events and warehouse verticals. Their goal is to fill these vacancies in the shortest amount of time with the highest quality candidates. By having high-quality candidates, Traba can build loyal client relationships and minimize churn.

Laser-Focused Vertical

Traba’s specialization in the light industrial sector is a key factor. By targeting businesses such as warehouses, distribution centers, and event venues, they have tailored their platform to the unique needs of these industries.

Comprehensive Software Stack 

Traba’s platform boasts a robust array of supporting software, including geo-tracking, data pipeline integrations, and 1099-NEC preparations. This technology equips businesses to source, onboard, and manage qualified workers more efficiently than traditional staffing agencies or job platforms.

By focusing on the light industrial vertical, Traba has built a high-quality pool of specialized workers who know the best practices, trends, and success factors for any relevant assignment, thereby minimizing training time and providing continuity for teams that need qualified workers. This talent pool, coupled with a comprehensive technology platform, allows companies to confidently hire quickly to fill their most important jobs.

The Traba Solution

Traba’s technology is built for the modern workforce. They have insight into the entire employee journey, use live location data, and automate processes such as clocking in and clocking out of shifts – all visible to operations teams via dashboards. Allowing them to identify key metrics that drive the business, such as on-time arrival rate. Their key features benefit both the workers on their platform and their business customers.

Seamless Mobile and Web Apps

Traba offers user-friendly mobile and web apps for both businesses and workers. These applications ensure a smooth experience for finding and managing shifts, as well as workers.

Rapid and Reliable Matching

Traba delivers impressive results with a 98.3% fill rate within just 24 hours, surpassing traditional staffing agencies that take 20 days to fill only 59% of roles.

Career Development

Workers on the platform can build entire careers, thanks to industry-specific worker profiles, verified skillsets, and in-app certifications.

Worker Punctuality

Just one example of how Traba’s innovation has contributed to advancement in the gig economy is how it handles worker punctuality. Their technology leverages geo-tracking to develop notification and support tools to ensure worker punctuality. These tools help workers optimize their time by giving them insight into travel time to job sites while giving business customers peace of mind with visibility into worker arrival data in real-time.

Traba’s Vision for Transforming Staffing

Traba believes that round-the-clock service and close attention to the key success metrics will continue to give their customers the edge in the quest for talent in the industrial sector. Their local operations teams ensure that jobs are staffed and that workers are vetted and prepared for each engagement. Traba has a process to monitor active shifts and deploy backups when necessary.

This rigorous approach to support allows Traba to boast a 98% fill rate to help its customers avoid operational downtimes from worker shortages.  Utilizing paid backups and notification alerts are just two ways Traba ensures positions are filled with the best available workers. Given their specialized talent pool, these workers are matched quickly to fill vacancies in the shortest amount of time. 

Traba is building a platform for the future of industrial work, a simple, frictionless, and scalable solution for every size of business—from small facilities to Fortune 500s.

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