Pickr

Pickr.works, founded as PICKR.WORKS LIMITED in 2016 by Kane Halsey (also known as Kane St Quintin), operated as a digital staffing platform targeting the inefficiencies in the UK's contract work market. Halsey, with a background in his family's highways and infrastructure business, identified the lengthy and costly process of hiring contractors and aimed to solve it with a technology-driven solution. The company has since ceased operations.

The business developed a workforce optimization tool designed to dramatically reduce the time it took for companies to hire a contractor, from an average of 12 days down to just 15 hours. Pickr focused on the energy, utility, and infrastructure sectors, offering a platform for on-demand and short-term hiring that aimed to reduce recruitment agency fees. The platform used matching algorithms to source suitable candidates from its 'talent cloud' of over 10,000 verified workers. For businesses, it provided features like real-time GPS information for contractors and predictive analytics on worker reliability based on past performance, which reportedly lowered the 'no-show' rate from 47% to 9%.

Pickr operated on a dual revenue model. The first was a managed service for large businesses, where Pickr would handle the entire project, including providing labor, project management, and supervision for a fee. The second model was a resource-only service, where the company would allocate contractors to customers and earn a fee for each completed shift. The company had gained nearly 9,000 app users since its 2019 relaunch and had processed over 82,000 working hours, paying out over £1 million in wages. Despite raising a total of $4.42 million in funding over four rounds, with a final seed round of $3.1 million in June 2020, the company is now listed as out of business.

Keywords: digital staffing, contract hiring, workforce optimization, on-demand labor, infrastructure recruitment, energy sector staffing, utility sector jobs, flexible workforce, contractor marketplace, contingent workforce, recruitment technology, labor marketplace, Kane Halsey, Kane St Quintin, Norwich startup, UK tech, verified workers, shift work, project-based staffing, recruitment platform, out of business, ceased operations