Tasty Startups: Sirvo
The Craving it Satisfies
A better way for employers and job seekers in the service industry to connect
Why it has a winning recipe
Before I meandered onto the freelance scene covering startups, I spent several years in the service industry. As a front-of-house captain at the restaurant where I worked for 10 years, it often felt as though I spent more time training new staff than I did attending to customers. Torture.
Hiring in the industry is a mess, usually done by word of mouth or coincidental timing. Neither method proving terribly efficient or productive. For every person tossed into the mix to fill a gap on the fly, I’d venture to say that five move out the door before long. No one wins. Servers go through the hassles of training, while not earning full tips, only to start at the beginning again. Restaurants invest a lot of time and effort in recruiting with nothing to show for it.
Sirvo is one of the few apps that I’m going to go along with saying could be a game changer. It’s a social recruitment and hiring platform for employers and job seekers in the service industry to find one another more easily. In an industry notorious for high turnover rates, it makes sense to have an online tool where information can be accessed quickly and vacancies filled more intelligently.
To keep payroll costs down, staff all over constantly face the threat of operating shorthanded, on a good day. Traditional advertising of positions, waiting for people to reply to classifieds, conducting interviews… what a joke. There’s no time for that. The show must go on night after night. There’s simply no time to spare.
With so much migrating and flux in the workforce, Sirvo could really make lives better for everyone by streamlining the hiring process. Bars, restaurants, retail, hotel – I worked them all, and found jobs usually by pounding the pavement so that I could show my face and hope my timing was right. This made for some long, depressing strolls.
There’s no reason in the world for there not to be profiles, resumes, vacancies listings, applications – a go-to source – where anyone in the industry, anywhere, can look to keep those tables turning more smoothly.
Sirvo is starting out in Denver and looking to expand to other US hotspots. I’ll be cheering for them.
Tweetable
Stop guessing who’s hiring or where the help is in the #serviceindustry. Everyone should be here, @gosirvo
Photo Credits
Sirvo | Robert Kneschke/Shutterstock | baranq/Shutterstock
