Interview with Workpop a Californian job marketplace4 min read

Workpop is one of our 930 job board partners. We recently interviewed Travis Morrison, Director of Growth. He talked about WorkPop, its innovations, its commitment and he gave us his insight of the e-recruitment market in United States.

About Workpop

Workpop is an online jobs marketplace and hiring solution. With a smart, easy-to-use platform, we empower millions of people and businesses in the service economy. Workpop operates in Southern California.

Innovations

· “Smart Rank” which allows you to sort your candidates based on how well their applications match your job description. Our algorithm can accurately predict who you are most likely to message for an interview, and bring them directly to the top of your inbox.

· Application Feedback: Our feedback system allows candidates to get real time feedback from our community. Currently, over 90% of users who request feedback hear back within 2 days, and users who request and receive feedback are nearly 2X more likely to get hired than those that don’t request feedback!

· Workpop Dash: Our recently released digital onboarding and employee management platform allows hiring managers to control all of their HR with one platform vs needing to use multiple different systems.

In terms of how we get employees to innovate, our culture is very engineer heavy, in fact, the majority of Workpop employees are engineers! Most of our team also comes from innovation focused companies like Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Amazon so innovation is in our DNA! We think of ourselves not as a hiring site but as a technology platform, and we are constantly pushing the boundaries of the hiring space with a focus on changing a typically slow moving industry. We all understand that our space is very competitive and to survive, we need to move quicker than the big guys and take the risks others aren’t willing to.

Workpop’s target audience

· We started out focused on the service economy (retail, restaurants, hotels, etc.) so the businesses we typically work with a small and medium size brick and mortar establishments. We also don’t typically work with recruiters, instead we interact with the owners and operators of the small businesses who use our service. On the job seeker side we tend to skew younger and are more tech savvy, although our strong focus on mobile has allowed us to reach markets many others have failed to reach in the past.

Future of the recruitment market

We’ve heavily invested in both our candidate and employer apps across iOS and Android and will continue to invest heavily in those platforms. In fact we have a very cool new project coming out soon but I can’t say too much more right now :).

We also believe that the market will shift to be more candidate focused. Right now most hiring platforms focus almost exclusively on the employers and treat candidates merely transactionally. We are committed to being a candidate focused platform and building products that will empower job seekers with the data they need to improve throughout the job search process.

The e-recruitment market in the United States

· I think the larger enterprise businesses have mainly moved online, but the smaller and even some medium size businesses continue to rely on help wanted signs and outdated job board for hiring and pen and paper for on-boarding. I think within the next 3-5 years there will be a big move to more tech friendly options which is why we are very bullish on our position, as we focus mainly on non-enterprise businesses.

· One other major trend for e-recruitment is a movement away from the normal PPC model and towards a performance based CPA model. This value focused shift will reduce the inherent waste in a PPC model and drive job boards to focus on how they can not only drive traffic but engaged and interested users to their partner sites.

Next steps and projects for Workpop

· Currently we’re focused on improving our digital onboarding and employee management product, Dash, and developing new ways to connect candidates and employers through a very cool recommendation engine that is in the works.

About Travis Morrison

Travis Morrison has been in the tech space for nearly 10 years starting his career at Google as an Account Manager for major clients such as Facebook, Groupon and Twitter. He then transitioned to Zynga where he moved into the product space and led the product team for Zynga’s San Diego studio. Travis joined Workpop in 2014 as the Director of Growth and now manages all user acquisition and product development.

Author: Dorota Beaurin