Welcome!

Hello there and welcome to our blog!

This is, as you already know, the Spare Staff blog, where you’ll find career advice, stories about anything to do with employment. While this will be the spot to get tips to advance your career, we’re also looking to make this blog a place to get inspired for your journey ahead.

Who we are

Spare Staff is built on the shared experiences of job hunting: the hundreds of applications to hundreds of companies, the nerve-wracking phone calls, the anxious waiting… all that. We’ve all been there. It’s a lot of emotionally-draining work, and we get that. We are an employment platform for job seekers made by job seekers, after all.

Spare Staff came about in around 2017, where founder James Nguyen was going through the particularly time-consuming and frustrating process of recruitment. As a small business owner in Sydney, Australia, James has gone through many years of the traditional method of hiring employees. He found the process of going through hundreds of applicants, shortlisting and interviewing them, then calling for references to finally make a hire quite tedious. This became something he wanted to fix.

After months of redesigning his business model, which originally was about to be around an ‘employee sharing’ idea, the Spare Staff we know now was born. It became a platform where employers could search for and hire any available potential employees, not only a shared employee from another company.

What we do

Spare Staff allows job seekers to create their profile to list their skills and experience for new opportunities to come to them. Employers can then find the right person for the job within a few clicks. We are an employment platform that makes the whole process of recruitment much easier and much more efficient.

How do we do it? By turning the employment process into an ‘online shopping’ experience. Job seekers can list their skills, experience, and key qualities on their profile, as well as their availability and expected pay rate. Then, like an online shopping platform, employers can pick out candidates by using our platform’s search filters.

Because of the difficulties that both job seekers and employers face during the recruitment process, we hope to provide the solution by creating a convenient platform to both hire and get hired.

A solution to your job seeking troubles

Job hunting is hard. This isn’t new information to any of us. As we’re also in the middle of a global pandemic-induced recession, the current situation of the world doesn’t make things easier.

With the traditional hiring process, a job seeker normally takes roughly 3-9 months to land a job. We’ve found that job seekers spend almost 70% of this time writing cover letters,  emailing back and forth to set up meetings, and waiting. A lot of it.

The advancement of technology has made us want things faster and easier. These days, with a few taps on our phones, dinner can come to your doorstep in less than 20 minutes. Because of the ease that technology has given us, people expect more. With that said, an update to the hiring process is way past due.

Job seekers may also find it hard to stand out during their job hunt. The current job market is getting tougher and tougher. Job seekers need to find better ways to showcase themselves as the perfect candidate. Writing cover letters and resumes that are attractive to employers can be a tricky thing too. Information and character qualities can get lost in the words, and hiring managers might not be able to catch them immediately.

A welcome shortcut

After a job ad is posted, an employer will most likely get hundreds of applications. These need a significant amount of time to get through. They might not even have the time to go through all of them.

What makes the always tedious process more annoying, is when you find out that some candidates don’t put any effort into their job applications. A lot of job seekers think that they need to apply to as many jobs as they can. That’s their way of ‘putting themselves out there’, so to speak. While this can be a good tactic, but this also brings down the level of attention and care that job seekers put into their job hunt.

When this happens, employers often receive applications where candidates haven’t even read the job description or any research about the company. Time is then wasted on filtering out these candidates who probably won’t get the job.

This is where we come back to the common problem with a job search: time that could’ve been saved. Employers should be able to efficiently find the right people. People that are right for the job that can work well within the company.

How it works

With our employment platform, job seekers can create a profile to list their skills and experience.  Users can highlight their achievements on an easy-to-navigate platform. All you need to do as a job seeker is tell us a bit about yourself, and that’s it! There is a way to get what you want. No more endless applying to jobs, no more cover letters.

So how do we get you jobs? On our platform, employers can search for candidates based on what they need for the job. They can pick from our search filters and find quality candidates that match their requirements. Job seekers can also list their expected pay rate and their availability throughout the week. This cuts the whole process shorter: job seekers only need to list themselves for hire, and employers can find people straight away.

Still, we’re not changing too much of everything. Just like any other job search, job seekers face the challenge of trying to stand out as a candidate. Employers don’t just look at experience, they look at how a candidate presents themselves and their attitudes towards new opportunities. That’s what makes the profile building process so important when you use our platform to find your next job.

Let’s do this together

Need tips on how to build the perfect profile? Don’t know how to answer tricky interview questions? Thinking about a career change? You’re in the right spot. In our career blog, we’ll be looking at the different problems that job seekers face during their job hunt. Along with this investigation, we’ll also put together a series of solutions and tips.

In our Spare Staffer stories, we also interview and get to know some of our users on how they managed their job search. We hope these stories and insights can inspire and better equip you for your Spare Staff journey. Take a look at our Help Centre to learn more about how getting a job on Spare Staff works.