WorkSumo: Helping the hourly workforce bridge the skill gap
Dedicated to Developing and Connecting the Hourly Workforce
WorkSumo's mission is to enable social mobility by bridging the skill gap between entry level workers and skilled trades. Our clients are suffering from major labor shortages due to the lack of skilled workers in the labor market. Entry level workers' livelihood are also threatened by rapid technological change in the market-place. To address these issues, we've built an on-demand employment platform to tap into a demographic of workers that are low-skilled and under-employed. After connecting our user base to work on-demand, we then connect them to a trade school to build-up their skills. Powered by A.I, our process of connecting and developing the hourly workforce will not only help create viable career pathways for those most vulnerable to rapid technological changes in the labor market, but will also assist with solving our nation's extreme skilled labor shortage.
- Upskilling, Reskilling, and Job Matching
- The Flex and Gig Economy
We've created a new technology platform and a streamlined process to help minority groups and impoverished populations to progress from working entry level and minimum wage jobs to connecting to educational training in various in-demand skilled trades such as welding,nursing, and computer programming.
Our platform serves as a marketplace for hourly workers to find and connect to jobs on-demand, as well as connect to opportunities to build a skill-set through curated online learning modules or with offline trade school partners. Ratings and Reviews for job performances by employers and skill building tracking (sourced from learning modules and enrollment in trade programs) will help optimize our a.i/data analytics and help create a seamless job-matching experience for employers and employees.
In the next 12 Months, we will increase our current user base from 15-20 daily active users working through the platform to 500 daily active workers on the platform. We will expand out from Salt Lake City and into the rest of the state of Utah.
We will increase our trade school partners from 1 to 5 in the state of Utah
In all, if we reach our metrics, we will generate roughly $4.1M in Gross Market Volume and 914K gross profits.
In the next 3 to 5 years we hope to scale our model to help assist 50,000 hourly workers nationwide to bridge the skill gap into high paying skilled labor jobs, and increase income by a minimum of 25% for our user base.
- Adult
- Urban
- Rural
- Lower
- United States
- United States
To grow organically, we've created a sub-vendor relationship with a large national staffing company call Smart Staffing. They service large companies with high-volume recruiting needs.
They will post jobs and use our platform to help fill in open positions.
This will create a demand for workers and we will utilize various digital marketing channels i.e Facebooks ads, job boards, and google ad words to create awareness of our platform online.
Our offline outreach activities will include hosting job fair events, speaking at local high schools, community colleges and technical colleges about our platform.
- For-Profit
- 7
- 1-2 years
We would charge a contract rate to employers for every hour that a job seekers works through our platform, similar to what traditional staffing/recruiting agencies are doing today. As an example, if workers our being paid 12/hr then our contract rate would be 16/hr charged to the employer. The contract rate would help cover payroll admin costs, taxes, and worker comp insurance.
We believe working with Solve can help acelerate our mission and vision to assist low skilled worker obtain the right training and skillset to remain relevant in an AI/Machine learning dominant labor market.
Our main key barrier is a lack of working capital to assist with our expansion into different markets.
Solve can help by referring investors and team members that may be good fit in helping drive our mission forward.
- Organizational Mentorship
- Connections to the MIT campus
- Impact Measurement Validation and Support
- Grant Funding
- Debt/Equity Funding