Farmstead is a grocery delivery service based in San Francisco. With COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandates, they saw business increase 10x nearly overnight and needed a way to keep up with customer orders.
Problem: Keeping up with an unexpected 10x increase in customer orders
Co-founder Kevin Li and his team needed to quickly hire warehouse workers to pick and pack grocery orders to fulfill customer orders. But they put a lot of care into their full-time recruiting process and didn't want to sacrifice quality for speed.
Solution: Using gigs to fill immediate and long-term staffing needs
Farmstead’s operations team worked closely with Instawork to meet both their quality standards and staffing requirements. With Instawork, Farmstead had a:
- Vetting process to ensure every warehouse associate met Farmstead's requirements, including a strong work ethic and written English skills
- On-demand, 24/7 booking platform where they can request shifts with short notice, minimizing overbooking costs
- Feedback rating system to easily identify and retain the Professionals that fit their culture
- Online roster and shift settings configured for the same people to return every day, saving time on training
- Live account team that proactively triages call outs resulting in a nearly 0% no-show rate
Results: Fully staffed, all the time
By closely collaborating with warehouse onsite leads, operations team, and Product, Instawork created a smooth staffing process even with many shifts booked on short notice. Within the first month, Instawork delivered:
- 460+ shifts using 100+ Professionals
- 100% fill-rate
- .44% no-show rate (that’s 1 out of 200 gigs!)
Lastly, Farmstead now has a reliable recruiting pipeline through Instawork. Both Farmstead and Instawork Professionals test each other out before committing to a full-time position. The temp-to-hire strategy already resulted in four full-time hires within a month.
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