Introducing Homebase Hiring

Today we officially launched Homebase Hiring to over 100,000 companies across the US. This new addition to Homebase rounds out the ability for our amazing local business customers to better manage, and now hire, great hourly teams. I want to share a little bit of the journey that got us to this exciting milestone.

Where We Started

I started building Homebase because of two people important to me: my restaurant-owning friend and my bartending sister. My goal at the time was to help eliminate a lot of the headaches they were dealing with day-to-day: the paper schedule, tracking hours, and all of the texts and lost post-its. I felt that technology could make the experience of managing hourly work easier, but I also saw another big pain-point they dealt with: hiring. Like many folks in local business, they were trying to find great candidates through walk-ins, Craigslist posts, and an overflowing inbox. From the start, I wanted to make hiring easier for them too.

Building Something Useful

Before we built Hiring, we spent over a year in customer research to make sure we were building the right tools for you. Two very generous businesses in our co-hometown of Houston let us take-over all of their hiring so that we could work side-by-side through the challenges. (Thank you, Mary and Kim!) I won’t soon forget being in Houston with them interviewing waiters, and remember the thrill (and challenges) of finding the right fit for their teams.

Early testing with Hiring (and an earlier version of Homebase)

From these learnings, we tested four different prototypes in different cities last year. We visited with dozens of restaurant owners, store managers, and others in these cities to hear the feedback and learn first-hand how they identified the right hires, kept all of the resumes organized, and managed their interviews. We drank a lot of great coffee and had a lot of desserts along the way.

Some members of the Homebase product team hard at work visiting a customer

After all of this, we started building. Earlier this year, we began to give customers early beta access, and we’re so thankful for all of the feedback that came in response.  We also spent a lot of time with our job board partners to make sure you get more applicants faster. With all of this feedback, we’ve been hard at work and gone through multiple designs to make sure Hiring works the way you do and helps you easily manage applicants wherever they come from.

Of course, we’ve also been testing the tool ourselves to grow our amazing customer success team, so you can get live US-based help posting your first job.

Now Hiring

The result of all of this is a hiring tool built for (and by!) local businesses. We’ve got 130+ customizable job posts that have been crafted by our in-house hiring experts and tested in the market to give you a fast and effective way to attract applicants. We’ll then post your jobs to the leading job boards, like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Facebook, Craigslist, and more. Your candidates are automatically sorted on over 20 traits (and a lot of nerdy data science) to help you find the best match, and they’ll receive reminders before their interviews to reduce no-shows. Of course, when you hire someone you can move them right into Homebase, and get them scheduled for work instantly. We hope all of these tools will help you build your team in less time, and we’re just getting started.

Thanks for all of the feedback–please keep it coming!

I am so proud of the team here at Homebase in what we’ve learned and built, and incredibly appreciative of the hundreds of busy owners, managers, and other Homebase customers who have tested, provided feedback, and helped us build Hiring. I want to give you all a big “Thank You” from the entire Homebase team. Your businesses make our communities so much richer, and we hope we can make it just a little easier for you and your teams.

Curious how to get started? Read more about Homebase Hiring here or attend a free online training and Q&A session on June 21st.

In Service,

John Waldmann

CEO and co-founder