27. Pickr

Founder: Kane Halsey
Founded: 2018
Website: www.pickr.works

Contract work is HUGE in the UK. But there’s a problem – finding and hiring contractors is a lengthy and costly process. Kane Halsey, founder of Pickr recognised this issue and has turned to tech to solve it.

In short, Pickr is a workforce optimisation tool. It reduces the average time it takes for a business to hire a contractor from 12 days to just 15 hours. With Pickr, a business could, in theory, advertise and fulfil a role by the next working day.

By cutting out multiple links in the supply chain of contract hiring, companies can tap into Pickr’s digital community of 10k+ verified workers and have a team of specialists assembled quickly and easily. But how does it all work?

Pickr sources the right candidate for the job from its talent cloud by using matching algorithms. The business seeking contractors will then receive real time GPS information of the contractor along with predictive analytics of the worker’s reliability based on past working experiences. This algorithm has helped Pickr reduce the average first-day ‘no-show’ rate from 47% to just 9%.

Pickr operates two revenue models. First, a managed service aimed at large businesses. Here the platform receives project briefs from businesses and Pickr provides labour, project management, and supervision for a fee. Second, Pickr provides a labour resource-only service whereby it allocates contractors with customers and receives a fee for each completed shift.

There were 4075 shifts worked through Pickr last year, and the platform gained almost 9,000 app users since its relaunch in 2019. Pickr has paid out over £1m in wages and commissioned 82,000 working hours on projects nationwide, helping the company reach the final of the ‘Telecoms Project of the Year’ at the National Tech Awards last year.

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons why multiple businesses are picking Pickr, and why we picked them for this year’s Startups 100 index.