Gigwalk: A company that helps businesses hire temporary workers

Matt Crampton, 34, is the co-founder and CTO, Gigwalk, an online employment agency that uses algorithms and geo-location to track and model worker behaviour, so companies can hire reliable, productive temps without ever meeting them.

Gigwalk hires temps for simple jobs such as testing iPhone apps or snapping photos of local businesses for online mapping companies.

Through GPS monitoring and customer feedback, Gigwalk tracks temps’ start time and stop time, punctuality, efficiency and thoroughness.
Next Steps
Gigwalk has raised $7.7 million form investors including Harrison Metal Capital and Greylock Discovery. Its app runs on US, Canadian, and UK iPhones; an Android app is due out this month. Raja Doddala, 7-Eleven’s director of new business ventures, used the app to test a storage locker service.

Efficiency “If you reply within an hour, your success rate for completing a job ends up being about 97 percent,” says Gigwalk Chief Executive Officer Bob Bahramipour. “But if it takes longer than five hours, that number drops to 47 percent.”

Learning curve
Gigwalk starts temps with simple jobs, and how well they complete those, may give them more complex ones over time.

User base

Members of Gigwalk’s “smartphone army” have completed more than four million jobs for 5,800 businesses, including Microsoft , BMW, and EBay.

Charges

Workers usually get $20 per hour and are paId via PayPal. Gigwalk normally keeps 30 percent to 40 percent per job as fee.