With $7.9 Million In Funding, Workpop Launches As A Job Marketplace For Hourly Workers

There are plenty of tools out there for recruiting and hiring professionals, mainly led by industry stalwart LinkedIn. But what if you’re looking for part-time or hourly workers? In the service industry, where quality workers can be hard to come by and turnover is significant, new jobs marketplace Workpop hopes to simplify the process of finding and hiring talent.

Launching first in Los Angeles, Workpop hopes to target the 76 million hourly workers in the U.S., most of whom don’t have detailed resumes or work histories online. For them, the platform is designed to simplify the process of creating an application by importing education and work info from Facebook and LinkedIn, setting up a profile and recording a video introduction to help employers screen them. They can even provide hourly availability if they have child care needs or work another job.

On the hiring side, Workpop provides tools to enable businesses to easily create job listings by filling out requirements, job descriptions, and information about the workplace. Since many of these jobs have a high turnover rate, businesses can reuse listings after they’re taken down if a similar job becomes vacant again.

The platform is designed to improve the process for both sides. Businesses can see how many applicants they’ve received for each job, as well as where those applicants are in the process of hiring. The platform is also designed to help with onboarding if a hire is made, and if not, recruiters can give honest feedback to applicants.

In a future version, applicants will gain access to a dashboard that will show that feedback from different jobs they had applied to, as well as see how their skills stacked up against those who actually got the job. It also uses the data provided to suggest other jobs that they might want to apply for.

The company was founded by former Zynga GM Reed Shaffner and Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz, who hold co-CEO titles. The founding team also includes CTO Benjamin Berman and Director of Product Henry Jay Yu.

The company just closed a $7 million Series A round of funding led by Trinity Ventures, with Trinity partner Dan Scholnick joining the board. That follows a $900,000 seed round, with other investors that include SV Angel, Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious Ventures, Cornerstone OnDemand, Joe Lonsdale, Aaron Levie, Slow Ventures, David Tisch’s Box Group, Ironfire Capital, Plus Capital, Facebook’s Lee Linden, Jim Pallotta, IVP’s Dennis Phelps, and Michael Marchetti.