Growing warehouse operations 10x overnight using Instawork

Farmstead is a grocery delivery service based in San Francisco. With COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandates, they saw business increase 10x nearly overnight and needed a way to keep up with customer orders. Instawork + Talent Point: Flexible work for Talent Point customers offers flexible solutions for businesses facing similar challenges.

Problem: Keeping up with an unexpected 10x increase in customer orders

Co-founder Kevin Li and his team found themselves in a challenging position where they urgently needed to rapidly expand their warehouse workforce to handle the overwhelming volume of grocery orders flooding in. Despite the pressing time constraints and operational urgency, they were committed to maintaining the rigorous standards they had always applied to their full-time recruitment efforts, refusing to compromise on the quality of their hires simply to meet the immediate demand.

Solution: Using gigs to fill immediate and long-term staffing needs

Farmstead's operations team worked closely with Instawork to meet both their quality standards and staffing requirements.

Here's what Farmstead gained by working with Instawork:

• Vetting process to ensure every warehouse associate met Farmstead's requirements, including a strong work ethic and written English skills
• On-demand, 24/7 booking platform where they can request shifts with short notice, minimizing overbooking costs
• Feedback rating system to easily identify and retain the workers that fit their culture
• Online roster and shift settings configured for the same workers to return every day, saving time on training
• Live account team that proactively triages call outs, resulting in a nearly 0% no-show rate

Results: Fully staffed, all the time

By closely collaborating with warehouse onsite leads, operations team, and Product, Instawork created a smooth staffing process even with many shifts booked on short notice. For more insights on staffing and self-employment, check out 7 of the most common self-employment tax questions, answered.

Within the first month, Instawork delivered:

• 460+ shifts using 100+ workers
• 100% worker fill rate
• 0.44% worker no-show rate (that's 1 out of 200 gigs!)

Farmstead now has a reliable recruiting pipeline through Instawork. Both Farmstead and Instawork workers test each other out before committing to a full-time position. The temp-to-hire strategy already resulted in four full-time hires within a month.