With the unemployment rate at 3.7 percent—a 50-year low—meeting planners might be finding it harder to procure reliable temporary staff for registration and help desks, F&B functions, and other event elements. In this vein, Instawork, an app for hotels, restaurants, or anyone hiring gig workers in the hospitality field, including event planners, announced its expansion into Washington D.C., New York City, and Boston. With this East Coast foray, Instawork says it is now the largest on-demand staffing app for the U.S. hospitality industry.
“There are about 10.7 million Americans employed in the hospitality industry, and a huge portion of these workers are in the largest East Coast cities,” said Sumir Meghani, CEO and co-founder of Instawork. “But with hospitality businesses struggling with high staff turnover and spending the majority of their time on staffing and logistics, Instawork can provide experienced and reliable staff.”
Instawork clients receive immediate responses on their event needs, with 97 percent of requests matched with qualified workers within 24 hours. The app, available on Android and iOS in English and Spanish, allows businesses to book staff via mobile app or desktop by selecting from a roster of prequalified professionals. Clients have the ability to request the most qualified staff to work their events, while both clients and staffers can rate each other on five-star scale after an event to make that system accurate and robust. Instawork operates with full wage transparency so that clients know what they will pay and staffers know what they will earn before an event starts.
Besides the three east coast cities, Instawork services restaurants, hotels, and events in Chicago, Las Vegas, Greater Los Angeles, Phoenix/Scottsdale, San Diego, and San Francisco/Oakland.
The firm’s competitors include Cadre, which launched online earlier this year specifically for travel directors and other meeting-specific temp jobs, as well as GCG Event Partners. Also, some meeting-planning platforms such as Aventri and Cvent provide links to temporary-staff firms in different cities.
