Many organizations and service providers who employ temps spend a lot of time and money on resolving staff management. Norwegian company STEPIFI decided to change that and create an on-demand staffing app that makes substituting labor efficient and cost-effective.
The idea got its start from the bottlenecks in Norwegian schools and kindergartens, where finding temporary staff is almost a daily challenge. It is common to use temp agencies for this, but this method can be expensive.
This was the seed for the plan to start a platform that would create an on-demand staffing app for the interested parties to get in contact with each other directly – without any middleman.
STEPIFI resolves the staff management in two main layers:
Internal – Resolve staffing with other full-time employees of the organization. This ensures quality.
External – Request supply temps with direct relations to the organization. This ensures efficiency.
Applications are always full of intriguing technical challenges, which makes them interesting to develop. Helmes was responsible for the apps interface, design, UX and database solution.
The on-demand staffing app was developed using IONIC’s Angular. (There are two applications; one for iOS and other for Android.)
The app has two channels, the internal database, and external database. The internal database is for optimizing the internal staff resources. The external database includes the contacts of external temporary workers. (All external contact can only access the list through an invitation to become a member of the environment.)
The recruiting organization has the possibility to send out a request for finding a temp by adding date, time, topic, requirements, and other information to either internal, external, or both contact bases. Or, the organization can choose only concrete contacts from the list they wish to forward the request to. They can also filter the list and send the request only to the people who fill the specific requirements.
Additionally, the on-demand staffing app enables communication (and file sharing) between the organization and suitable temp within a chat feature, either in a one-on-one or in-group chat.
No additional channels in the on-demand staffing app for recruiting a temp are necessary.
The on-demand staffing app has the following functionalities:
STEPIFI was established in 2017 with its focus on creating a digital way of working with temps in the Nordic education sector. This unique service has granted the following improvements for organizations:
The on-demand staffing app service has now been deployed to private sector businesses and is currently in use in Norway.
"We are creating a solution for organizations that need to save time and money and don’t want to pay expensive staffing agencies money when they can do it themselves. Helmes has understood our business needs and created exactly what STEPIFI needed to launch the solution in the market. When working with a super-agile solution, you need to be agile in the way we work together, as well. Helmes solved this skillfully and continuously improved the development process."
If somebody wants an app, then what should one consider?
If you want an app – and, like in our case, are to sell it to a given market – do thorough market research; you cannot learn enough of the market/users you are approaching. A good question you can ask yourself – are the users that are experiencing a problem (the users of the app) the same people that are to pay for the solution? Is it necessary for an app? Can we solve it in another way?
Personally, I love apps, but we see a trend where we don’t need apps for everything anymore. It should be a valid reason for building an app. It must provide more than just an added value – it must provide something that you can’t do in any other way.
If you are to make a custom app, make sure that you know what that means. It needs continuous development and improvement. Users expect that everything is to work flawlessly – if one thing is off, the expected result is bad. App users expect great UX and zero downtime. Have this in mind when setting up your team.
Anders B. Hovden – Founder & CEO
Even though custom software development is our passion, we do care about many other things as well. We contribute to the following initiatives.
In April 2014, we started and continue the annual Collective Investment Program „Something Special“. We place 5% of our profits into the fund every year for the use of which the employees can present proposals and vote for the best proposal. As a result of the ideas presented by the employees and voting, currently ca 50,000 euros of the fund’s resources have been equally allocated to two intended purposes:
We have teamed up with other Estonian entrepreneurs to set up a philographic fund, which aims to offer seed capital for innovative solutions, principally in secondary education in Estonia, with a target spend of over €1 million, which it already has to hand, over the next three years.
Developing students’ knowledge in the sciences, creativity and their ability to work in a team, which are the key competences of modern economy, are a focus of the program.