Kirti Shenoy (00:02)
Hey everyone, I'm Kirti Shenoy and this is Great Work, the podcast where we talk to people building the pipes and the platforms that power the real economy. Today's guest is Gino Rooney, someone who's been on the front lines of modern staffing tech for nearly a decade. Gino has founded BlueCrew, one of the first platforms to go all in on W-2 employment for hourly work. At a time when 1099 was the norm, BlueCrew built the infrastructure from compliance to scheduling to scale light industrial staffing in the right way.

That company was acquired by EmployBridge in 2022. And now Gino is back with Classet, a recruiting platform focused on skilled trades and on rethinking how candidate experience actually works when your resume doesn't say it all. Let's get into it. Gino, thank you so much for joining us today.

Gino Rooney (00:49)
Yeah, super excited to be here to chat.

Kirti Shenoy (00:51)
Awesome. Well, you know, I'm a huge BlueCrew fan and obviously I've known you for a couple of years, but let's start with what you're working on today. Tell us a little bit about what you're building at Classet and the problem that you're solving.

Gino Rooney (01:02)
Yeah, absolutely. So, at Classet we're building an AI recruiting assistant to help talent acquisition teams operate more efficiently while providing a great candidate experience. Right now, our  core focus is at the earliest stage of the hiring funnel. So essentially from post-apply to qualify and engage with candidates. What we see right now is that recruiting teams spend a lot of time at this part of the funnel, especially when they're dealing with

high volume roles or in the frontline workforce where they get inundated with applications. So rather than having a recruiting team deal with constantly reaching out, reviewing resumes and going through the process of engaging with potentially like uninterested or non-responsive candidates, what Classet does is it sits at that sort of piece of the funnel, will instantly engage candidates and allows them to conduct a contextual conversational voice interview with AI. So you had mentioned working on problems where resumes don't tell the

full picture and this actually provides a much better candidate experience because we do a lot of work in like the skilled trades and those types of roles where folks might have resumes that are two to three years out of date or they haven't touched it in a while. And giving candidates the opportunity to instantly interview and talk to someone on the other end of the phone about their skillset and communicate what their background is provides a much better candidate experience and it saves recruiting teams a lot of time.

Kirti Shenoy (02:23)
I love that insight, Gino, and you know, I talk to probably hundreds or thousands of staffing companies each and every year, and this comes up a lot, you know.

Staffing, ⁓ know workers that work at staffing agencies or work in these skilled trades might not have You know what white-collar employees have like, you know a LinkedIn and a resume that's perfectly formatted so much of their work and ⁓ the nuances of what they do are much subtler than that so I think this is an awesome problem to solve and You know, it's great to see that you're still you know focused on sort of this niche in staffing and kind of wanted to dive into that a little bit so obviously I've been a huge fan of BlueCrew for many many years and you know

you really built BlueCrew from scratch and sold the business. So what was the insight that actually led you into working in the staffing ecosystem and what caused you to actually start BlueCrew? What inspired that?

Gino Rooney (03:14)
Yeah, ⁓ so I think there was kind of two dimensions. One was, you know, in the founding team, we had folks that had previously worked through staffing agencies before. So myself personally, throughout high school and college, I worked in a warehouse to help make summer ends meet. And we went through a staffing agency to get that work and get paid and all of that. And I'd be working alongside folks that had, you know, they were juggling sometimes two to three different jobs and learning more about the process of just how

inefficient it was for them to be able to actually find work and get work and get paid, ⁓ kind of stuck with me over the years and I always wanted to work on something that I felt could make an impact ⁓ for folks that deserved a better opportunity or a better way to find ⁓ and acquire work. The other dimension, another one of our founders had been on the other side of the coin, so had been working in operation centers where they were going through staffing agencies and it just seemed like there was a lot of paperwork and

not as much technology as there should be in terms of you know, posting requisitions to let folks know that you're looking for work and then just connecting with workers as well. So you can have a good idea of, you know, who's showing up to work, what their background looks like in a way that, you know, didn't require you to have to go back and forth with, you know, a recruiter or someone at a staffing agency.

Kirti Shenoy (04:29)
I love that. actually didn't know that you worked at a staffing company before. I feel like, you know, ⁓ every time I go to staffing conferences, people are always like, how did you get into this industry? Because, you know, once you're in the industry, people usually say, but, you know, how did you find the industry in the first place? So it's cool that you worked at a staffing company yourself and kind of had that first-hand experience understanding, you know, what was it like to onboard? What was it like to take a shift? And, you know, what were the problems that may come up when you were doing that work? So that's super awesome. And, you know, obviously BlueCrew.

Gino Rooney (04:53)
Mm-hmm.

Kirti Shenoy (04:59)
know, tens of thousands of workers working across the United States, a very, very successful company that ended up getting acquired by a very large ⁓ staffing company. You know, what was the moment that you had while building BlueCrew where you really realized, hey, we're working on something pretty cool that is, you know, working and scaling and really seems to be sustainable? you know, What was that moment for you when you were building BlueCrew where you felt that way?

Gino Rooney (05:27)
Yeah, know, reflecting back, it's hard to say if there was like a singular moment. think maybe one of the times where we saw some momentum and I was like, wow, this is actually saving people a lot of time and doing a really good job connecting with folks was in the early days. So we were based out of the Bay Area and some of our earliest customers were all the different like stadiums and like hospitality events. And these are events where you need to find, you know, 100 to 200 folks on really short notice.

a pretty good use case to introduce some technology that's better at matching and getting people lined up for shifts and helping collect their hours and just eliminate a lot of the paperwork involved that adds time and inefficiency to such a short shift with so many people. So ⁓ I think maybe the first or second of the ballpark games that we staffed where it was 100 folks ⁓ and being able to just see how quickly our platform would fill those roles, we would just sit back and ask ourselves,

did people do this manually? How are people currently going through and calling all these resumes and finding folks that are interested in getting them placed on jobs because those types of jobs you need to fill two to three days notice. it was just a good kind of aha moment for us that like, technology really can help ⁓ when it comes to getting people placed to work faster, especially in these types of roles.

Kirti Shenoy (06:49)
I love that insight and it's so true. You you build this app and you build the process, but nothing is better than actually seeing that hundreds of workers showed up on time and were able to be deployed and do the work that they said that they were going to do. It's pretty magical that, you know, that entire process can almost be facilitated ⁓ through technology and with the help of technology. ⁓ And I agree with you. There's nothing like, you know, seeing real human beings show up at a place and do the work and knowing that, you you are a part of placing them there.

⁓ So that's super, super awesome. And kind of transitioning into that, you know...

BlueCrew in particular, obviously you guys have done so much in so many different sectors to innovate and were one of the early sort of gig style staffing companies in the market. But something that I really love about BlueCrew is you were also one of the first gig slash tech forward platforms that really decided to adopt a W-2 model. And I think if I'm not mistaken, you guys were 100 % W-2 for a phase of the company as well.

the giant gig companies like the Uber and DoorDash is of the world. They're all 1099. That's kind of the way that the industry, or at least the tech forward industry thought of gig style work, but you decided to take a W-2 approach. So could you walk us through, why did BlueCrew decide to embrace that W-2 model and how did you do it? How did you do it when there was no really, there wasn't really a playbook on how to do W-2 and this style of work?

Gino Rooney (08:20)
Yeah, so I'd say there wasn't really a precedent for doing it in like a super tech forward way. Although, you know, when you look at the staffing industry as a whole, this is something that they've been doing for a very long time. And when we decided to go W-2 from the beginning and throughout our whole history, we never really offered 1099 work as an option. There's like two reasons, I would say primarily first, trying to do right by the

people on our platform and workers. We had folks that were working overtime, we felt like they should be getting overtime. They also should be protected with workers' compensation and not having to find their own insurance outside of ⁓ working on our platform. So a little bit of a ⁓ sort of virtuous decision of just wanting to do right by the folks on our platform. ⁓ But there was also a real just sort of compliance and sales angle to it too, which is

It's very difficult to work with larger enterprises if you're going to be telling them you're sending 1099s into their warehouse to work alongside W-2s doing the same exact work. So ⁓ we saw pretty quickly that if we didn't have a W-2 offering from our initial conversations before we even built BlueCrew that it probably was going to silo us to only working with specific customers that are comfortable taking on the risk of potentially misclassifying their workforce as 1099s because they maybe also launched in California where

rules are probably the most stringent from the employment side of things. ⁓ For us, it was a pretty conscious decision, both on the worker side doing right by them, and then also ⁓ making sure that employers were comfortable using a new product like ours from a compliance and risk perspective.

Kirti Shenoy (09:56)
I like that insight, you know, and you know, it's awesome that you guys cared about, you know, the overtime and the minimum wage and making sure that workers, you know, were paid fairly and accurately, which is awesome. But to your point, ⁓ launching W-2 could really be that revenue driver for your company at the end of the day. We're all businesses and we're all trying to make revenue. And this comes up time and time again, you know, when I get approached by customers that are maybe only in the 1099 model, they're typically approaching me with, hey, Kirti, we want to close this really large client and this

really large client requires us to have W-2 workers because they want the workers to be insured. They don't want a political scandal that these workers were contractors and they didn't get health insurance. They want to know that they're partnering with a company that's going to take care of that compliance burden and they don't want to partner with companies that maybe don't have at least an offering for that W-2 model. So I love that point which is, you know, it's great to give the workers, ⁓ you know...

The great overtime and the minimum wage and maybe the health insurance benefits you feel good about you know the work that you Are doing but also W-2 can be a really great revenue driver that helps you to close even larger clients ⁓ And and get into those deals. And to your point traditional staffing companies I mean there's like three four thousand traditional staffing companies and most staffing companies are W-2 or primarily have a W-2 style work, but really in the gig tech enabled ecosystem We're starting to

Gino Rooney (11:15)
Okay.

Kirti Shenoy (11:20)
see that they are maybe like 1099 forward but now inching towards W-2 when they're fighting for the same contracts where they're head-to-head with those legacy staffing companies. So I really like that sort of insight. ⁓

Gino Rooney (11:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, it makes

a lot of sense. think the, it certainly is easier to go to market with a 1099 model, which is, I believe why a lot of folks in their kind of early startup days went with, you know, the 1099 forward offering. And you can definitely work with, with customers and get a good customer base from doing that. W-2 certainly has a lot more complexity in terms of, you we had talked about just like monitoring overtime laws, like meal break waivers, like all of the fun stuff that goes along with a W-2 hiring.

But yeah, it is something that, as you mentioned, larger companies, as you get in, want to know that they're being protected just as well as the workers are being protected when it comes to following employment law.

Kirti Shenoy (12:12)
Absolutely, absolutely. And kind of thinking about the labor marketplace, obviously, you know, any labor marketplace and staffing company, it's all about supply and demand, right? You want to get more and more of these clients that want ⁓ to utilize your platform to find ⁓ workers. And then you also need to control the supply side, which is, hey, who are the workers that are actually going to show up, whether it's to that concert venue or to that warehouse, to do that particular style of work? So in your case with BlueCrew, and when you were scaling out that company,

what was harder for you? Was it the supply side or the demand side?

Gino Rooney (12:48)
I would say the finding ⁓ demand was sort of our go-to-market strategy and then following up with supply afterwards. There certainly were exceptions where finding supply would be very difficult. think back to a couple of customers that we had in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That's a very rural area where acquiring workers is not very easy and acquiring folks on the platform. But primarily, our go-to-market was predicated around finding great

great partners finding good demand and then launching like satellite markets with them when they wanted to expand us into other regions.

Kirti Shenoy (13:25)
totally makes sense and other than that you know correct me if I'm wrong did you guys also do beyond entertainment staffing like workers that were working hospita- hospitality shifts or working at concert venues do you guys also do some work in light industrials?

Gino Rooney (13:41)
Yeah, that was probably 70 % of our business was in distribution centers, ⁓ logistics, 3PLs, those sorts of production associates, those types of roles. So ⁓ pretty heavy presence in the light industrial space, ⁓ so much so that ⁓ a fair amount of our sales efforts were targeted towards, we'd go to industrial parks and go knocking door to door and just talking to them about BlueCrew. ⁓

We even had a, at one point we had an Airstream that was a BlueCrew branded that we would post up outside of like industrial parks and talk to folks. So yeah, a lot of, a lot of our business was in, that sort of warehousing sector.

Kirti Shenoy (14:22)
I love that. love that. Well, let's talk about light industrials as a market sector in particular, because we work with light industrial companies from all aspects of the spectrum. Some are more tech enabled. Others are, hey, we are printing and distributing checks on the floor to all of these workers. So what were the nuances of maybe entering the light industrials world, a world where maybe the employers and even the employees were expecting things to be very, very manual?

like manual onboarding where you're pen and paper filling out your onboarding documents and you're waiting in line to pick up the check at end of the week. How did you navigate that when you were launching BlueCrew, which is of course a more tech forward, tech enabled way of ⁓ servicing those users. So could you walk us through a couple stories from that one?

Gino Rooney (15:12)
Yeah, so I mean, in the earliest days, like, you know, within the first year of launching our onboarding process, ⁓ probably could have been even more tech enabled than it was. So we were, you you mentioned kind of filling out the paperwork in person and things like that. ⁓ We would, we would moonlight ⁓ as, you know, recruiters and onboarders. So we would essentially like rent out different like conference spaces across the Bay Area. And we would host onboarding sessions where we would go through and

explain our platform, take people through the paperwork that they needed to fill out and get them all set up for whether it was direct deposit or payment by check and whatever that might be. ⁓ Over time, we made that a lot more automated of a process. ⁓ Certainly during COVID, some things changed too where I-9 verification, you're allowed to do it remotely for a bit. That definitely helped, but we always had some local presences in the markets that we went to. ⁓ In the light industrial space,

specifically, I think one area where folks potentially expect a little bit more, call it white glove or manual efforts was at some of the large distribution centers, staffing agencies will have ⁓ floor managers or folks that are on-site reps and things like that just to help troubleshoot questions. And I do think that's a really important ⁓ relationship building. ⁓

angle for a lot of the agencies to offer. that was something that we eventually started to do with some of our larger customers was offering them ⁓ on site folks. But to the point about like delivering ⁓ payroll and things like that, we always had it either direct deposit or we'd be mailing out checks. And eventually we had like daily pay and all that stuff too, which I think is really awesome for like the like industrial workforce because a lot of folks are working paycheck to paycheck and being able to

pull down daily pay early is a big win for them.

Kirti Shenoy (17:05)
I love that, I love that. think that those are some really great insights. think if I were to summarize what you said, know, for at least for your enterprise customers, maybe, you know, offering them a little bit more of a customized approach of, hey, we'll have people on site kind of walking the workers through onboarding if this isn't that new for you, just to make sure that you're comfortable with that process. And then B, you know, the incentive on the worker side is, hey, maybe you were used to getting paid once a week or every other week with a physical paycheck. But, you know, we want to do better than that. We want to help you ⁓

to

embrace technology and you're going to get rewarded for embracing the technology because you're going to get paid faster and faster. So I love those ⁓ sort of insights. And you know, it's kind of an interesting challenge. There are traditional companies in warehousing that want to partner with staffing companies but maybe are worried about embracing ⁓ the tech forward approach. And then there's also staffing companies that are also afraid for the same reasons. You know, they want to bring their onboarding to a digital process. They want to bring payments to digital process, but they're sort of

fearful of switching up that process and switching up what they've done for decades. So any other words of wisdom that you would provide to both companies embracing tech forward staffing companies and then staffing companies that want to embrace being more tech forward, what advice do you have for them for maybe taking that leap or considering to take the leap to digitize more of their systems?

Gino Rooney (18:30)
Yeah, I think the best way you can do it is sort of one step at a time and maybe starting with the angle of staffing agencies that are looking to embrace more technology. I think really analyzing your recruiting and hiring funnel and your customer relationships and looking for opportunities where they would be open for a more digital onboarding experience or even at the top of the funnel where we focus that with Classet, we view that as a very highly leverageable

spot to put technology in play to drive a better candidate experience and save your team some time. ⁓ I do think there are some areas though where having a customer relationship or letting workers be able to talk to someone is important. When it comes to payroll or ⁓ payment related things, you think about the light industrial space, in a lot of ways you're almost acting as a bank for ⁓ the folks that are out working because a lot of their

savings is tied up into the work that they're doing. So if you don't provide them with an opportunity to actually talk to someone or get someone on the phone when they're having trouble, it is a degraded customer experience. I think My advice for the staffing agency that we're looking at adding technology, I would probably focus in areas where you feel like you can get the most ⁓ operating leverage from without sacrificing important candidate experience ⁓ moments along the way of them working with you. Because that really does drive better retention as if folks...

feel like they're part of your team and that they can talk to someone if there's an important issue. On the employer side, I'd actually say technology is becoming somewhat like table stakes in the light industrial space for working with large employers that are hiring large amounts of hourly workers. Because ultimately, it is an efficiency driver. And if the employer is looking for the most efficient and cheapest hiring technologies out there,

there's a chance that that staffing agency might get left behind if they're not able to really ⁓ service that account as fast and quickly and as efficiently as others are able to in the market. ⁓ I do think a lot more employers, though, are becoming more more open. I think when we first started BlueCrew, was a lot of ⁓ getting people into mobile apps or just having a online staffing platform was like the buzzword at the time. over the last 10 years, you know, it's

It seems like a lot of companies, and even the large staffing agencies, have their own online platform offerings. So ⁓ I do think there's not much of a barrier anymore for employers that are thinking about getting started trying to use a more tech-enabled solution just because there's a lot of them out there, whether it's startups or big agencies that have deployed technology ⁓ on their side of the house.

Kirti Shenoy (21:14)
I love that. Yeah, I totally see that change. know, more more staffing companies, at least for one side of their department, might be experimenting with those more online tech forward efforts. And we're starting to see this in the market as well. Staffing companies taking maybe an acquired entity, a company that they've acquired, and then just saying, hey, this is going to be our tech enabled arm and our little guinea pig experiment where we're going to go with, you know, the upgraded recruiting tools and the upgraded onboarding tools and the upgraded payroll tools. And we're going to see if this is sustainable.

Gino Rooney (21:37)
Mm-hmm.

Kirti Shenoy (21:44)
because if this is sustainable and this works, we need to bring it across the rest of the organization. But yeah, don't be afraid to experiment with, you know, ⁓ a guinea pig sub company that you own with this ⁓ line of effort because it could be ⁓ the thing that helps you to win more deals and helps you to just totally revamp the entire org. ⁓ So I love that. And, you know...

Couple more questions here, you know, Obviously you built BlueCrew, put your blood, sweat and tears into that company and then ended up having a very successful acquisition ⁓ with EmployBridge, which is one of the largest staffing companies ⁓ sort of in the United States, which is awesome. So what did it take for you to scale BlueCrew into a place where

EmployBridge could actually acquire that and like what are your tips for maybe staffing builders that you know want to build a big business but maybe want to build a business that could get acquired by another giant and make an impact there so any thoughts or ⁓ feelings or stories that you have on on that journey for the EmployBridge acquisition?

Gino Rooney (22:52)
Yeah, I think, you know, really trying to focus on building where you think that the target is going, not where it's at is pretty important. Like what you had mentioned, just like the W-2 model and being kind of one of first to markets with that. ⁓ We knew that that was something that these large staffing agencies, they already have a W-2 offering, but they're going to need to figure out how to offer something like that in a much more tech forward way. So that was certainly sort of part of our kind of go to market plan was building where we believe that the industry is heading and where it needs to go.

which certainly as you're a builder of ⁓ staffing solutions, thinking through those sort of things and trying to build towards that moving target where you believe it's going to be as important. As we scaled our business, ⁓ we were a team of maybe two or three for the first, or sorry, we were a team of eight for the first two or three years. And we really focus on just being kind of.

lean mean and making sure that we can kind of prove out that the unit economics of this model do work before we scaled it out. ⁓ Certainly in the staffing space, there are large profitable businesses built in the staffing space. So we always knew that that was something that we should keep our eye on and we shouldn't just spend a bunch of money to spend a bunch of money and grow really quickly when we know there is the opportunity to just build a really, really awesome staffing solution in this space. ⁓ So I think

Moving at the right pace is really important. And a lot of times, like your customers will help kind of push you in the direction of how fast you should be moving as a builder. And then as we continued to grow, so when we went from, know, a team of eight all the way up to, I think at the peak, were maybe a hundred, 120, really looking for opportunities as you continue to grow to leverage more operational efficiency. So staffing is a very,

operationally heavy business and it needs to be because there's a real function of customer service in staffing. And it's really, really important to have good relationships with your clients and ⁓ be able to offer them a white glove service when they deserve a white glove service for all they're doing for you too. ⁓ I think just looking for kind of operational wins along the way to make sure that you're giving your customers exactly what they need, but you're also not, ⁓ you

growing your company way too big and burning way too much cash, I think is important too, to just keep an eye on the longer term operating leverage that you have as you're building your business.

Kirti Shenoy (25:16)
Absolutely, I love it. know, Both you and I were in Y Combinator and a phrase that gets said a lot is don't die. Stay in the game.

Gino Rooney (25:26)
Mm-hmm.

Kirti Shenoy (25:26)
keeps scaling your business and whether you're bootstrapping or you're VC backed, it's a business is a business and it's don't die, continue scaling, be mindful of your expenses, but also keep growing. to your point, I think staffing companies, especially staffing companies that are growing, whether you're in the early stages of one to 10 million in revenue or.

even beyond that kind of phase, embracing technology and doing things the right way might be your win and your entry point to getting acquired by a larger staffing company, right? Because these larger staffing companies, want to experiment with tech and they don't know how to do it. So sometimes acquiring the right company that already has those processes, those really awesome operational processes and those tech products in place can be a great, again, guinea pig for them. ⁓ So embracing technology, embracing ⁓ making those operational improvements for the company

Gino Rooney (25:57)
Hey.

Kirti Shenoy (26:17)
that you have could be your ticket into getting acquired by a really large company. So I really love that insight. And we spent a lot of time talking about BlueCrew and your journey there. So thanks so much for sharing those stories and words of wisdom there. But let's bring it back to Classet. Right now, you've decided to stay in the staffing industry. So I think you like this space and have more that you want to do for this space, which I love. But let's talk about Classet. So you guys are focusing on really revolutionizing

recruiting, what part of the hiring process in particular do you think is broken and needs a serious revamp, ⁓ you know, in the staffing ecosystem?

Gino Rooney (26:58)
Yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back to my point a minute ago about just like trying to create operating leverage as you're continuing to grow, whether it's a staffing organization or any hiring organization in talent acquisition operation. ⁓ A lot of we saw this when you're scaling up BlueCrew was we constantly pretty needed to hire pretty often needed to hire more and more folks to just help with taking candidates that had expressed interest or raise their hand for some position and making sure that they were

interested, going to show up qualified and wanting to be put forward in front of a customer to go to show up for work. So ⁓ that's really where Classet is focused on helping create more efficiency for talent acquisition teams. It's the point of application all the way to qualifying and getting that candidate in front of whether it's a hiring manager or the end employer. So the way that that currently works is, you

Let's take you as an example, you apply to a role. ⁓ We're working with a customer. We typically embed into their applicant tracking system or whatever their hiring workflows are. As soon as our recruiting assistant, we call her Joy, sees your application come through. If it looks qualified, Joy will reach out to you and say, hey, thank you so much for applying. We use an AI-based recruiting assistant to help speed up our hiring process and meet you where you're at. Do you have any questions and do you have any time to talk?

That process is all automated and will also reengage the candidate because we saw this at BlueCrew that a lot of folks don't respond to the first message you sent them, so you need to really treat it like a sales funnel. And then once the candidate's interested in looking to move forward, ⁓ it'll automatically shoot an outbound call to them or they can do it over a web call and just conduct a completely autonomous AI-driven phone interview, which is heavily customizable by the end employer. And what it really helps do is just remove a lot of the friction involved with going from

this massive amount of applications that you get on the job boards these days to, here's a list of folks that have raised their hand, talked about their skillset, meet the requisite criteria, and are looking to move forward with work. And we saw at BlueCrew that that was where a lot of time was being spent, just manually having to reach out to folks and actually do that qualification process.

Kirti Shenoy (29:04)
I really love that insight and I think ⁓ this comes up a lot with the staffing companies I talked to and I think the most successful staffing companies are ones that actually care about the workers consenting to the work that they're signing up for, right? When a worker actually wants to do a particular assignment, they bring a totally different energy to the workplace. They're excited to do the work, they wanted to do the work, and they're so excited because the staffing company actually cared about the style of work that they wanted to do and wanted to connect them to those opportunities. So I think the

more that we can create those magical moments where, you know, staffing companies are really placing those workers and workplaces that they're excited to be in the better outcomes that we can really produce ⁓ for not only the staffing company, but especially their clients and also the workers, which is awesome. And, you know, I want to talk a little bit, you know, this wouldn't be a podcast without me having to mention a little bit about something around AI and AI in staffing and, you know, staffing companies want to embrace

Gino Rooney (30:02)
Okay.

Kirti Shenoy (30:04)
AI and sometimes can be confused as to where to start. So you know, can you talk about how Classet is kind of helping staffing companies to utilize more AI to be more efficient? ⁓ Could you walk us through how Classet is doing that?

Gino Rooney (30:20)
Yeah, so we work with a fair amount of staffing agencies. also are direct to employer as well. So we have customers in the end employer space too. But our kind of core philosophy is think about leveraging Classet as if you were going to hire your own recruiting assistant. So what that means for us is we need to be able to operate inside of their current hiring system. don't.

We don't want to create a situation where they're having to leverage multiple tools to get stuff done or where they're having to, potentially migrate from one applicant tracking system to another just to work with us. So, that's typically how we work. And we really sit at that initial point of the funnel to really help them with that qualification process too. So, one of the stats that we saw looking at some of the application data on our platform that I think is like obvious, but also like really important for people to understand is that, you know, 60 % of candidates apply to jobs outside of business hours.

So when you think about that at your staffing agency, if you're not running a 24 seven desk, you could be losing a lot of candidates because you're not able to get to them in time. And part of having an AI recruiting assistant in your system, ⁓ you can even start small, use it for off hour support so that candidates can get in touch with your business when they are where they are. And we saw this at BlueCrew too where...

Kirti Shenoy (31:15)
I'm sorry.

Gino Rooney (31:40)
It's very common for folks to have lot of questions about a role before they decide if they want to move forward or not entirely. You mentioned making sure the candidate wants to work there. That's an important piece of it too. If you're taking four or five days to get back to someone just to understand if they're interested in a role, the odds are that they found somewhere else to work already. That's really where we focus. In terms of helping companies leverage AI, we are pretty hands-on just because, especially in the staffing space,

Every use case is slightly different. So we do work pretty closely with customers to make sure that our solution is pretty tailored to their existing hiring workflow and actions candidates into the places that they want them action based on the outcomes of the interactions with the AI recruiting assistant. So ⁓ I could totally see from the perspective of a potential staffing agency that there is just like so much AI noise out there and so many different tools you can plug into your workflow. I think the

my advice would be, know, first look at your, your hiring stack and try to identify like, where are we spending the most amount of human hours dealing with problems that we feel like could be automated or are highly repetitive. And I say this coming from a place of like, I don't, fully believe that recruiters are really, really important for staffing agencies, for the hiring ecosystem. ⁓ where I believe that it's heading is recruiters.

becoming more and more sort of like helping with like the last mile logistics of getting people really excited about the role, the speaking about like the culture of the companies that they're going to be working at and freeing them up from a lot of the like monotonous top of funnel work. So ⁓ when I think the staffing agency is thinking about leveraging AI, what I would recommend is just take, take like a holistic view of your hiring stack, look for areas where you feel like there's a lot of repetitive, autonomous or ⁓ repetitive administrative work going on.

and then try to identify solutions that can help solve that because more more solutions are popping up every single day.

Kirti Shenoy (33:40)
That's awesome and a great insight. AI can work after hours and help answer the questions for the workers to make sure that by the time you're awake and back to work and at your desk, the worker is closer and closer to accepting that role. So I really love that insight. And I guess to kind of wrap up this portion of the podcast before we move into the rapid fire.

Gino, I'd love to know what is something that you used to believe in staffing or the industry in general that you no longer believe after working in the industry for 10 plus years? What's something that you had as an insight ⁓ or what's something ⁓ that you used to believe in building and staffing that you no longer believe anymore?

Gino Rooney (34:26)
Um, I think one thing, there's probably two things. One thing that I used to believe, but no longer really even then maybe one thing that I have a new found respect for. Um, so the first one is, you know, when we started BlueCrew, you know, I believe that there was, you know, an opportunity to automate 99 % of what a staffing agency does. Um, and maybe that was just being like a little bit too rosy eyed, but, um, kind of going back to some of the early conversations like

Customer service is a competitive advantage in the staffing world and understanding how you can free up your team to focus more on the important customer service checkpoints versus ⁓ them doing like kind of repetitive administrative work that doesn't provide you with that operating leverage is kind of the name of the game. So I think that's one thing maybe I don't believe anymore is like you can have like a completely autonomous staffing agency because I do think there is a really real component to

having customer service as a competitive advantage. The sort of new found respect thing, I don't know that there was ever not respect, but staffing agencies are hard. It is a full stack business, everything from dealing with onboarding, compliantly, payrolling, time tracking, off boarding, compliance, like workers comp, like it is very much a full stack business.

It is, yeah, I have a lot of respect for folks that are building staffing agencies because you really do get, you're just solving so many problems in so many different departments or areas of company building.

Kirti Shenoy (36:03)
I could not agree more with you, Gino. I think...

⁓ To your point, it's so important for staffing companies to spend their time in the right places. You know, spend your time thinking about how you're going to grow your business, how you're going to continue to reconnect with the workers that are on your platform, and then partner up with providers or try to really reflect on how you can automate that end-to-end process of how you're going to do everything from onboarding, payroll, workers comp, recruiting, reporting, invoicing. I mean, those are a lot of things that a staffing company has to get right.

Gino Rooney (36:35)
Okay.

Kirti Shenoy (36:36)
So it's really about spending your time on the right things, which is growing the business and keeping workers happy and working with the right type of software providers that can really listen and help you to automate those flows. And then also maybe help you out also with.

a bit of that customer service piece, you making sure that workers are getting paid and that they can reprocess their payments or making sure that workers can get their questions answered in the case of Classet So I really love that insight. Now, kind of for the final portion of the podcast, I'd love to run through just some rapid rapid fire questions. So, Gino, I'm going to hit you with them. So first off, what is the craziest staffing or recruiting challenge that you've ever had to solve?

Gino Rooney (37:12)
Do see this.

I think it would probably go back to some of those like stadium jobs where we needed to come up with, you this was in the early, early days when we needed to come up with, you know, fill a job of 200 folks within like, you know, 24 to 48 hours notice. It definitely required, there were weekends where we were just, you know, holed up in an apartment, just smiling and dialing as much as we could, doing anything manual or programmatic that we could do to try to fill roles. Then certainly a fair share of just, you know,

what I would call like unfortunate moments that happen when you're in the staffing world where a candidate behaves in a way that you hope they wouldn't have behaved. And yeah, I feel like there's probably a coffee table book that we could fill up with stories from that. But it was also a great learning that those types of things happen in staffing and how you respond to them and how you provide support throughout that process is a potential differentiator for customer relationship building.

Kirti Shenoy (38:13)
I love that. And what's the best piece of advice that you've ever received as a founder and business owner?

Gino Rooney (38:20)
Yeah, I think a lot of the guidance that YC gave us when we went through YC was really, really helpful. They really push you towards ⁓ trying to grow and get revenue and work with customers as quickly as you can. Because once you have paying customers, that's when there's something at stake. And you get a lot of really good feedback. And it pushes you to build your product in the right way.

I think the advice to just really try to grow fast and push and try to get paying customers was really important in the early days for us. And then I think as we grew the company, ⁓ I don't know who this would be attributed to, but I remember reading some quote or hearing some mantra around like nothing is ever as good as it seems and nothing is ever as bad as it seems, which in both the startup world and the staffing world, I feel like has helped us to just keep like sort of like an even keel mentality because we just know.

know, staffing can be cyclical. Things can happen that are out of your control. And in the same way, you can have something really good happen that doesn't end up as good as you think it might. You can have something really bad happen, and that's an opportunity for your team to rally around and ⁓ improve from. So I think just that sort of mantra has helped us like remain sort of even keel throughout our startup journeys.

Kirti Shenoy (39:33)
Love it. And then last question, you know, our podcast is called great work. What do you think great work means to you?

Gino Rooney (39:41)
Yeah, I think great work is the output of what happens when you have a group of folks that are highly motivated by the problem that they're solving and very closely in tune with the users that they're going to be solving that problem for. ⁓ it's, know, great work creates operating leverage, it creates momentum and it also ⁓

I think there's certainly sort of like the blocking and tackling work that can be great work. But when I think about great work, it's things that create operating leverage and create a great, you know the mantra from YC of make something people want. ⁓ To me, that's what great work is when you make something that people want.

Kirti Shenoy (40:28)
I love it. Well, Gino, thank you so much for your time today. had so much fun diving into the toolbox of BlueCrew and congratulations on all the work that you've done with Classet. I'm so happy that we have these ⁓ amazing operators in our space that I've built for staffing and really know what they're doing. So congratulations on all that you've done and thanks for joining us today.

Gino Rooney (40:32)
Yeah, it's

Yeah, sure thing, it was fun.

Kirti Shenoy (40:54)
I'm Kirti Shinoi and this is Great Work, the podcast where we talk to people building the pipes and the platforms that power the real economy. From workforce marketplaces to payroll infrastructure, staffing isn't just about jobs, it's about systems. Behind every shift filled, every onboarding flow, every your hired notification, there's someone scaling the tech and the operations to make it happen. On Great Work, we will sit down with founders and operators who have done exactly that. Oops, should I redo that? Can I redo that?

Okay, let me redo that. And then also, do you want me to take a pause in between the second section or no? Just keep going.

Okay.

Okay, let me redo that.

Hi, I'm Kirti Shenoy and this is Great Work, the podcast where we talk to the people building the pipes and platforms that power the real economy. From workforce marketplaces to payroll infrastructure, staffing isn't just about jobs. It's about systems. Behind every shift filled, every onboarding flow and every your-hired notification, there's someone scaling the tech and the operations to make it happen. On Great Work, we sit down with the founders and the operators who have done exactly that.

Today's guest is Gino Rooney, someone who's been on the front lines of modern staffing tech for nearly a decade. He co-founded BlueCrew, one of the first platforms to go all in on W-2 employment for hourly work. At a time when 1099 was the norm, BlueCrew built the infrastructure from compliance to scheduling to scale light industrial staffing the right way. That company was acquired by Employbridge, one of the largest staffing companies in the United States in 2022.

Now Gino's back with Classet, a recruiting platform focused on the skilled trades. He rethinks about how candidate experience will actually work when the resume doesn't say it all. On today's conversation, Gino's gonna share stories from building BlueCrew, ⁓ talk a little bit about the acquisition from EmployBridge, and then go into Classet and what he's working to continue making strides in the staffing ecosystem. Let's get into it.

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