Hiring Is Broken for the People Who Need It Most

When we started Workstream, one of the first things we did was visit restaurants, gas stations, and retail stores to watch how managers actually hire people.

What we saw was remarkable. A general manager at a fast-casual restaurant, already working 50+ hours a week, manually sorting through paper applications between the lunch and dinner rush. Texting candidates from a personal phone. Losing track of who they’d already talked to. Scheduling interviews on sticky notes.

This wasn’t a rare case. This was the system. Across America, the businesses that employ the most people — restaurants, healthcare facilities, retail chains, logistics companies — were running their hiring on a patchwork of paper, personal phones, and sheer willpower.

The invisible workforce

There are roughly 80 million hourly workers in the United States. That’s about 60% of the total workforce. They stock shelves, care for patients, prepare food, drive deliveries, and keep the physical world functioning. During the pandemic, we called them essential. And they are.

Yet when you look at the hiring software landscape, nearly all of it was built for knowledge workers. LinkedIn, Greenhouse, Lever — these are excellent tools designed for a world where candidates have resumes, email addresses, and the time to sit through a multi-stage interview process.

Hourly workers live in a different reality. They apply on their phones, often while on a bus or between shifts. They might not have a traditional resume. They need to start working this week, not in four to six weeks after a recruiter screens them. Time-to-hire isn’t a metric to optimize — it’s the difference between making rent or not.

What building for this world taught me

Building software for hourly hiring taught me a few things that apply far beyond our product.

Speed is respect. When someone applies for a job and doesn’t hear back for a week, that’s not just a bad candidate experience. It’s disrespectful of their time and situation. They might be choosing between three offers, all of which came from whoever texted them back first. We built our product around the idea that a manager should be able to move an applicant from application to offer in hours, not weeks. The technology to do this isn’t particularly complex. The insight is that it matters.

Mobile-first isn’t a feature, it’s a worldview. We learned early that most of our applicants don’t have laptops. Their phone is their primary computing device. Designing for mobile isn’t about making the same desktop experience fit on a smaller screen. It’s about reimagining the process entirely around how people actually live. Short forms. Text-based communication. One-tap actions.

Simplicity is the hardest product requirement. The managers using our product are busy. They don’t want to learn software. They want to fill an open shift. Every feature we add has to earn its complexity. If it doesn’t make the core job faster or easier, it’s noise. This discipline — the relentless question of “does this make the hiring manager’s life simpler?” — has been the most valuable product principle I’ve ever followed.

Why this matters beyond hiring

I think the pattern we’ve seen in hourly hiring is playing out across many industries. There are enormous populations of workers — in healthcare, logistics, trades, food service — who have been underserved by technology because they don’t fit the Silicon Valley archetype of a user.

They don’t have time for onboarding tutorials. They don’t read documentation. They don’t file support tickets. If the product doesn’t work immediately and obviously, they simply won’t use it, and you’ll never get a second chance.

Building for these users makes you a better product builder, period. It forces you to strip away every unnecessary step, every clever-but-confusing interaction, every assumption that your user is sitting at a desk with time to spare.

The next wave of important software companies, I believe, will be built for the workers who’ve been overlooked. Not because it’s charitable — because it’s a massive market that’s been poorly served, and the companies that figure out how to serve it will build something durable.