Shift-based work marketplace raises funding to connect employers and job seekers

Photo credit: Freeboh announced today it has raised a pre-series A round of funding. The amount is undisclosed. The funding comes from a number of angel investors including Pang Shuxin, executive director of baby and mother product retailer Mothercare, and Chow Tuck Onn, chairman of animal health products and feed supplements company Diasham Resources.

In shift-based work, employers hire people when certain hours need to be filled, and employees can choose their working hours.

The full funding is immediately available to the company, co-founder and CTO Calvin Sim tells Tech in Asia. “Under the right conditions, the funding from this round will support us until we break even and beyond for our Singapore operations. That said, we are also actively exploring opportunities to scale beyond Singapore as we gain traction locally,” he says.

The startup decided to raise money despite the negative investment forecasts in the beginning of the year. “We think that the revolution is just starting for small and medium businesses to move more of their business and their operations online and to the cloud,” Calvin says. “More specifically for us, we think that today more than at any other time, there is a need to offer flexible work arrangements.”

The team decided to approach these particular investors because they have a first-hand understanding of running businesses that involve managing shifts and irregular working hours. “They bring to the table a lot of practical and tacit insights, and could open their network of local and regional partners to us,” Calvin explains.

On the clock

Freeboh offers job opportunities on a shift basis. The website displays individual shifts in various businesses and gives job seekers information like start and end times and hourly wages when they apply. Applicants create a profile on the site, which displays their previous experience for employers to peruse.

Shift-based hiring is a flexible form of employment where businesses hire people to work specific shifts during the day. The idea is that an employer hires (and pays) people when certain hours need to be filled, and the employee can choose his or her working hours according to his or her needs.

The startup was founded in 2013 by Calvin and Alex Pang, who is the CEO. The two of them were looking for ways to use then up-and-coming web technologies like HTML5 and increasingly faster mobile internet to help solve labor-related problems. Their first attempt was an app that let part-time workers specify hours of availability during the day.

The system would then allocate them to open shifts in its database. The app got some good traction, Calvin says, but it quickly became apparent that workers found it tedious to keep specifying their hours of availability every day.

So the team reversed the idea. Instead of asking workers to block out working hours, they would ask employers to advertise available shifts. “We found that by allowing job seekers to actively select the shifts rather than passively being assigned to them, we saw more responsible behavior as they took ownership of their choices,” Calvin explains.

That also helps workers keep their CVs up-to-date without too much trouble. The more a job seeker uses Freeboh, the more his or her profile is updated with the relevant experience.

Some of the more common job types the company fulfills include service crews, retail assistants, telemarketers, and packers.

Flexible work