Overview

Work Entropy is transforming the gig economy from the ground up by empowering independent employees with a service platform for gig workers to forge profitable partnerships through inspired training and empowering work opportunities. 

Work Entropy’s gig platform helps skill-based freelancers across 50 countries find profitable and meaningful work and sources independent employees from application to onboarding within 24 hours or less. At the same time, the company is giving businesses access to a service platform to crowdsource gig workers worldwide who are available, trained and certified to perform work.

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Human Capital Management

The Problem

While gig-based apps like Uber, InstaCart, and DoorDash have contributed to the surge in gig work, the shift to remote work accelerated by the pandemic made staffing with gig workers more compelling. For the customer service realm that often struggles with high turnover, gig economy employment offers greater autonomy and satisfaction – allowing an individual to select their own hours and opt-in options for jobs that match their skills, values, and lifestyle.

The cost and effort to hire/onboard new contact center agents is prohibitive, especially when the industry’s high turnover rates are taken into account. For a typical contact center using "traditional" interviewing/hiring practices, it takes on average 10 on-site interviews per hire and between 5 to 7 weeks to recruit/hire/onboard/train a new agent at a cost of approximately $6,500 per agent.

In today’s challenging job market, it’s crucial for organizations to attract, nurture and retain quality talent. Today, many businesses are devastatingly short-staffed. Attrition remains the single largest issue in contact centers, and most are competing for the same employee base as other businesses and must give candidates a better perception of their workforce culture upfront.

With a goal of “connecting humans with resources to build sustainable lives,” Work Entropy is solving both workforce issues and greater good social issues of inclusion and global prosperity.

The Solution

Work Entropy is reverse-engineering traditional talent recruitment and acquisition practices, relying on virtual technology to assess knowledge gaps and identify opportunities to learn new skills, while tapping into each individual’s mindset to understand how they personally work best. Work Entropy matches individuals with gigs near and far to effect joyful and profitable work for more prosperous living. The 24/7/365 availability of the interview platform enables independent employees to interview for positions via a fast/efficient/multi-lingual process that promotes workplace inclusivity and full participation– reaching even the most disadvantaged individuals on a worldwide scale. Incorporating automated, intelligent candidate screening helps speed up the hiring process and more efficiently couple the right worker with the right gig. The Work Entropy Academy Portal provides disqualified individuals with the resources to train, skill up, and qualify for other work.

The results

While talent is distributed broadly on a global scale, opportunity is not. Work Entropy quickly connects workers to work while effectively eliminating the costs of acquisition/training/onboarding from the equation. Without these costs, companies can pay higher wages, allowing individuals worldwide to participate in the global workplace, breaking free of the cycle of poverty. The Work Entropy platform captures candidate’s working requirements to quickly develop profiles, guiding them through a seamless process to qualify them for a variety of work, all managed in real time to ensure a seamless candidate experience. Work Entropy leverages an innovative hiring solution that uses voice, advanced AI, and analytics to help pre-assess a candidate’s job-related performance. This effectively helps hire employees most likely to succeed in the job that leads to a richer employee experience. This helps pre-assess the skills needed/promote engagement earlier in the pre-hiring process to gauge aptitude to ensure job success and satisfaction. This is important to contact centers that require language proficiency/engagement/enthusiasm/empathy/alertness among other “soft” skills to deliver exceptional customer experience. Plugging into the gig economy workforce helps contact centers maximize staffing during peak hours, manage unexpected surges in call volume, and accommodate for geographic dislocation and continuous follow-the-sun operation.

Metrics

• Enhanced scalability and reach of talent, with expedited background, skills assessment, and language certification processes: Work Entropy is sourcing candidates from application to onboarding within 24 hours and has conducted +7,000 candidate assessments in 50 countries worldwide in less than a year.
• Reduced costs of talent acquisition: Corporate clients are achieving a 55% savings in hiring costs.
• Improved retention rates: Corporate clients are seeing a 100% increase in 90-day retention rates, and lower overall attrition rates improve by 67%.
• Higher, more competitive wages for workers: One corporate client has been able to improve wages by 100%.

The Technology

As a critical element in its go-to-market approach, Work Entropy uses the Verint Intelligent Interviewing (VII) virtual candidate screening and skills assessment solution to elevate candidate quality and customer engagement, accelerate speed-to-hire, and enhance employee retention via automated, analytics-driven candidate screening. Using advanced predictive modeling and analytics, VII ensures consistency and equity in interviewing and screening while also reducing the risk of mis-hiring.

Disruptive Factor

Work Entropy is a glowing example of conscious capitalism, effectively solving the contact center staffing crisis while bringing profitable, sustainable job opportunities to individuals in the world’s most impoverished, remote, and rural areas. With a goal of “connecting humans with resources to build sustainable lives,” Work Entropy is breaking the barriers to sourcing and onboarding people worldwide who desperately want to work, connecting them with companies that desperately need qualified workers.

For contact centers, Work Entropy provides the ability to conduct globally dispersed, high-volume hiring. Expanding reach to a global candidate pool gives organizations many more candidates to select from while increasing the potential for quality candidates. The 24/7/365 availability of its intelligent interviewing platform enables independent employees to interview for positions via a fast, efficient, and multi-lingual process that promotes inclusivity and full participation in the workforce for all – reaching even the most disadvantaged individuals on a worldwide scale – whether they are in Kenya or the streets of San Diego.

Shining Moment

Through its platform, Work Entropy is identifying “Community Managers” - native speakers/advocates for their local community. They help Work Entropy understand the challenges in various regions and identify resources needed to address unemployment and homelessness. A community manager in Veracruz, Mexico worked with Work Entropy to build a primary school; in Kenya, a community manager helped put in place an apprenticeship and student placement program with Kenyatta University.