Tinder changed the dating game in the internet age.
It gained its massive popularity in the first place by rendering dating into a simple swiping process for the busy millennial.
This startup is taking up that idea and giving it their own twist to make a “Tinder of Jobhunting”.
It invites you to install the app on your phone, and from there you can swipe left or right on potential jobs, instead of potential baes.
Many of us are familiar with how platforms like Jobstreet or WOBB work. The layouts invite you to click on the offers to read about it in more detail and place emphasis on encouraging the interview to happen.
Those platforms thrive on giving as much information as possible to both sides of the hiring process.
Instead, SlingApp makes it convenient to swipe for short-term jobs.
The unemployment rate among youths in Malaysia is a real problem. The national unemployment rate is 3.5%, but the total unemployment rates for youths shoots up to 10.7% as of 2015.
Co-founders of SlingApp, Lucas and TJ, discovered a gap in the market for part-time job hunting.
“We realised that almost every retail shop faces trouble hiring part-time staff all year round. On the other side, there are a handful of youngsters who need extra income but find it difficult to get jobs. What if we can make hiring faster and more efficient?”
So SlingApp built the swiping in as a key part of their design. Based on your location, SlingApp will push available jobs near your location, filtered by the preferred industries you’ve set.
They’re not replacing any big-name job-hunting platforms anytime soon, but it’s not like they’re trying.
Instead, they want to help high turnover jobs find employees fast, without expending too much effort.
Hungry part-timers can easily hunt down the jobs they want, and gain a good reputation for producing good work in a measurable way, even when they jump from job to job.
If you’re not sure if the job is for you yet, SlingApp does let you bookmark that job for you to come back to later, which is one marked contrast from the Tinder idea.
On our own exploration of the app, we noticed a lot of F&B or retail jobs that you would usually have to go door-to-door for. So if SlingApp gains traction, it might help modernise part-time jobhunting here.
We’ve heard of a similar idea across the Causeway, but back when we tried it out, it felt lacking because of not enough job listings.
In SlingApp’s case, they reported that 70 companies have joined their ranks, including the likes of Nando’s, Morganfield’s, Sunway Lagoon, Flycycle, to startups such as Health Metrics, TeleMe, OtomateMe and CanLaw.
The key difference with Tinder is, you can’t initiate chats with your employers.
You can use the Instant Chat to express your interest in the job (once every 12 hours), which SlingApp characterises as similar to Tinder’s ‘Super Like’. But conversations can only be initiated by employers.
You even get a ‘You’re hired!’ popup on the app like Tinder.
“Part-time jobs are fast-moving and have a higher turnover in general. I reckon this is a very beneficial platform for retailers and business owners who need to hire someone from weeks later to even tomorrow.”
“The regular process takes up too much time on face-to-face interviews and travelling for both employers and employees. On top of that, SlingApp allows both parties to have an informal chat on-the-go.”
One unfortunate aspect about Tinder is how you can’t really filter through if someone’s a bad date or not. After all, a good or bad date is subjective.
But a good or bad employee is a more obvious metric, so SlingApp lets recruiters rate the employees on the app, as an applicant filtering process.
This way, consistently good part-timers can get more jobs in the future, while the free market can weed out undesirable workers.
As with most rating systems though, we can see this system getting abused though if an employer was particularly vindictive, but that would make them less popular among the jobseekers as well.
So far, the response to their app has been encouraging.
“We have used only a handful of marketing channels to reach our users and our users have responded very well,” said TJ.
“After going live in end of May 2017, we have over 3,000 downloads on both iOS and Android and we are growing exponentially by the week.”
“We have received plenty of user feedback voluntarily (which was quite a surprise to us) who want us to keep improving to serve them better.”
But SlingApp is still in its early stages. They haven’t even built a mobile version of the platform for the recruiters.
Of course, since the whole concept of SlingApp banks on its convenience, they definitely need to make it as easy-to-use as possible for everyone.
“We had to ensure the two-sided market (recruiters and applicants) both equally benefit from using SlingApp,” said TJ.
“Having built SlingApp with only the basic features, we have lined-up many exciting new features that facilitate speed-hiring in the near future, including having a mobile app for recruiters to manage and chat with applicants.”
“We aim to match applicants to recruiters within 1 minute of using SlingApp. ”
Once the app is convenient and viable, the pair hopes to take it into the ASEAN market.
“We hope that SlingApp can give business owners a new perspective on speed-hiring; closing the gap in the market where users in need for quick bucks meet recruiters who are constantly worried of staff shortage.”
“Ultimately, we would like to share this platform with our neighbouring countries and express SlingApp’s purpose of existence.”
Editor’s note: We’ve updated the title to more accurately reflect that SlingApp is not the first to have the swipe feature in Malaysia for job-hiring.
Feature Image Credit: SlingApp