Many organizations and service providers who employ temps spend a lot of time and money on resolving staff management. Norwegian company STEPIFI decided to change that and create an on-demand staffing app that makes substituting labor efficient and cost-effective.
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The New Ways of Working in the Making
The idea got its start from the bottlenecks in Norwegian schools and kindergartens, where finding temporary staff is almost a daily challenge. It is common to use temp agencies for this, but this method can be expensive.
This was the seed for the plan to start a platform that would create an on-demand staffing app for the interested parties to get in contact with each other directly – without any middleman.
STEPIFI resolves the staff management in two main layers:
Internal – Resolve staffing with other full-time employees of the organization. This ensures quality.
External – Request supply temps with direct relations to the organization. This ensures efficiency.
All-in-one temp recruiting
Applications are always full of intriguing technical challenges, which makes them interesting to develop. Helmes was responsible for the apps interface, design, UX and database solution.
The on-demand staffing app was developed using IONIC’s Angular. (There are two applications; one for iOS and other for Android.)
The app has two channels, the internal database, and external database. The internal database is for optimizing the internal staff resources. The external database includes the contacts of external temporary workers. (All external contact can only access the list through an invitation to become a member of the environment.)
The recruiting organization has the possibility to send out a request for finding a temp by adding date, time, topic, requirements, and other information to either internal, external, or both contact bases. Or, the organization can choose only concrete contacts from the list they wish to forward the request. They can also filter the list and send the request only to the people who fill the specific requirements.
Additionally, the on-demand staffing app enables communication (and file sharing) between the organization and suitable temp within a chat feature, either in a one-on-one or in-group chat.
No additional channels in the on-demand staffing app for recruiting a temp are necessary.
Main functionalities
The on-demand staffing app has the following functionalities:
- Create a private secure pool of users (Digital Supply Pool)
- App in three languages (Norwegian, Swedish, and English)
- iOS, Android, and Web access
- See who is away in your organization
- See the history of all your requests in the app
- Built-in support on all platforms (Intercom)
- GDPR consent builder
- Role-based system
- Certificate of good conduct
- Active-user login
- Subjects, Class, Roles, and Reasons
- Settings based on each organization
- Skills on all users
- And many more …
Great success with numbers to prove it
STEPIFI was established in 2017 with its focus on creating a digital way of working with temps in the Nordic education sector. This unique service has granted the following improvements for organizations:
- Availability of the substituting labor. In the last quarter of 2018, the app helped to solve 5,000 substitute hours in Norwegian kindergartens and schools, with the help of in-house as well as with external contacts.
- Time-saving. The person who is responsible for finding temporary staff in kindergartens spared approximately 30 percent of their work time thanks to the app.
- Cost-saving. Compared to temp-agency mediation, the app enables to employment of temporary staff for lower costs. We don’t have precise calculations due to the variable cost of temp agencies, but STEPIFI lowers the cost considerably since you have direct access to your own pool of workers.
The on-demand staffing app service has now been deployed to private sector businesses and is currently in use in Norway.
We are creating a solution for organizations that need to save time and money and don’t want to pay expensive staffing agencies money when they can do it themselves. Helmes has understood our business needs and created exactly what STEPIFI needed to launch the solution in the market. When working with a super-agile solution, you need to be agile in the way we work together, as well. Helmes solved this skillfully and continuously improved the development process.
Anders B. Hovden – Founder & CEO
Some good advice for building an app
If somebody wants an app, then what should one consider?
If you want an app – and, like in our case, are to sell it to a given market – do thorough market research; you cannot learn enough of the market/users you are approaching. A good question you can ask yourself – are the users that are experiencing a problem (the users of the app) the same people that are to pay for the solution? Is it necessary for an app? Can we solve it in another way?
Personally, I love apps, but we see a trend where we don’t need apps for everything anymore. It should be a valid reason for building an app. It must provide more than just an added value – it must provide something that you can’t do in any other way.
If you are to make a custom app, make sure that you know what that means. It needs continuous development and improvement. Users expect everything to work flawlessly – if one thing is off, the expected result is bad. App users expect great UX and zero downtime. Have this in mind when setting up your team.
Anders B. Hovden – Founder & CEO
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