5 Questions with Kaylan Millis of Adia

Learn why Adia has established an agile hiring process for temporary workers and how they remain competitive.

First, tell me a little bit about Adia, why it was founded, and the Adia team’s approach to staffing

Adia was founded by our CEO, Ernesto Lamaina after he applied for the position of “CEO for One Month” at Adecco and out of hundreds of applicants was chosen for the position. He then realized how challenging it was for branches of the company to find short term employees in a short amount of time. He was on a long car ride and came up with the idea for an app that informs temporary employees of potential job opportunities near them. Adecco was excited and Adia went from a dream to a reality. After proving successful in Switzerland and the UK, Adia made a presence in the US. 

The main goal was to provide a solution for both businesses and workers. Businesses often have last minute needs for temporary staff, and no matter how good your HR team or staffing agency is, last minute demands aren’t easy to fill. Traditional staffing agencies still rely on the process of calling applicants or screening walkins for these types of jobs. There’s not enough lead time and knowing if someone is qualified can be tricky. That’s where Adia steps in. We made everything staffing related possible through our technology. Workers that are interested in one off gigs, temporary work, or temp to hire download the Adia app and complete our simple onboarding steps to become a W-2 employee of Adia. Then once a business “creates a booking” any worker that meets the qualifications matches to the job and can instantly tap “book gig” to get hired. We make everything “on-demand.” Workers don’t deal with the hassle of applying and waiting to get hired, or hoping to hear back from a staffing agency. 

I know you’re keeping on top of legislation changes and potential trends, how do you think legislation will impact hiring in the next few years and what are you doing to prepare?

Compliance is everything when you’re dealing with hiring workers as W-2 employees and our compliance department does a great job of making sure we are on top of changes or even potential changes that would require developmental effort and time to complete. 

One of the legislative changes that occurred this year opened a new door for Adia. When the AB5 bill passed in California, companies had to react quickly to find a solution to move from independent contractors to their employees being W-2. With only a few months to do so, many large organizations couldn’t make it happen. That’s where we stepped in. Companies can transfer their current employees to Adia, we employ them as our own W-2 employees, and the businesses can continue to “book” these workers throughout our platform. That even makes everything from risk and liability, to payroll and taxes a breeze for their HR department. 

An example of how Adia was very agile with a governmental change was when we had 6 weeks to update the W-4 tax form in the app. If you’re familiar at all with the developmental processes for changes in an app you know it takes planning, resources, and time. We saw our teams come together very quickly to make it happen and that’s what we’ll continue to do if over the years more and more changes come our way. 

Adia takes an agile approach to hiring. What does that mean to you and why is it important?

Everything has evolved to the digital world. Think about it, you don’t even have to pick up the phone to schedule a doctors appointment, order something to eat, or have groceries delivered. Why should staffing be any different? Hiring the right fit for a job or filling a position on the fly shouldn’t be taken lightly and there’s no room for human error.

I knew I’d love working for Adia from the second I read the job description online. I’m a super compassionate person and the idea of workers being able to onboard once and book any job on the fly meant a lot to me. That’s someone that needs to score a weekend gig to pay bills, or the teacher that’s off for the summer and wants to keep busy or make some extra money, or the temp-to-hire position that someone has been searching for. We help people expand their interests and skills, while making sure businesses know there’s an agile solution for one of the biggest pains they deal with: staffing. 

You don’t just create an app, release it to the public and sit back and watch. We’re constantly evolving and listening to our clients needs, workers requests, etc. What’s important to our consumers is important to us.

What are key things staffing companies and hirers need to do to stay competitive? 

When you look at a job board, let’s use warehouse workers for example, you’ll see countless jobs to choose from. The responsibilities of a warehouse worker may not vary much from one company to another, so how do you choose which one to apply for? You have to offer something the other doesn’t. 

We’ve found that pay and location are the most influential factors in our workers accepting a job. If your pay isn’t competitive then find other ways to excite workers. For some of our hospitality gigs it’s been as simple as a free meal each shift, or for others the possibility of overtime or flexible schedules. 

For hirers themselves, it’s easy to stay in a pattern of doing things the same way you’ve done them for a while. Maybe that’s because corporate told you so, or change and new processes seem risky. To stay competitive you have to be ahead of the game. Be innovative, seek new platforms and solutions to minimize the amount of manual tasks completed and leave no room for error. We’ve seen this with countless enterprise level clients. Once they moved away from using 4 staffing agencies at a time to one platform to handle all of their needs, they said they wouldn’t go back.  

What are the steps you’d recommend hirers and staffing companies take if they’re interested in digitizing their processes?

Know what you’re getting into. Start with scrapping paper resumes and start to build a process that can be automated as much as possible. Adia’s goal is to be “zero touch” so that our workers can fully onboard, book jobs, get paid, and more solely through the app, without needing assistance. In order for that to happen, you have to trust your platforms and the teams building them. Without our phenomenal product and development team, digitizing the process would be near impossible. A lot of time, money, effort, and coffee goes into but the reward outweighs it all. 

Start with evaluating your current pain points. What are businesses needing that they aren’t getting from you? Can you staff fast enough and provide quality workers? How can you reduce the no-show rate and offer people jobs they’ll stick with? For workers, why did they choose to download an app they saw an ad for? Learn your audience and see what their needs are and evaluate how your processes could be optimized and what areas could be digitized. Remember to keep the users experience top of mind. Without API integrations with companies like Checkr we wouldn’t have the seamless onboarding experience we do for our workers.