WORKSTREAM

Desmond Lim knew exactly what went wrong with hourly hiring because he lived it twice. His parents worked hourly shifts their whole lives.

Later, he opened a restaurant in college just to pay tuition. He spent months trying to hire staff using clunky software that nobody actually used.

He and co-founder Max Wang sat down to interview over 100 executives from companies like Starbucks, GE, and Uber. They kept hearing the exact same complaint.

People just wanted to text back and forth like regular humans. They realized the industry was completely stuck in the 1990s.

They scrapped that global outsourcing idea they were working on. Instead, they built a platform that talks to candidates where they already are.

It was 2018 in San Francisco. The pivot worked immediately.

Restaurants and local businesses lose thousands of dollars when a shift goes unfilled. Workstream fixes it by moving the entire hiring process into text messages.

Candidates apply with a quick text. Managers screen, schedule, and onboard them without touching paper or email chains.

Businesses pay a monthly subscription to use the software. It works exactly like your favorite chat app, but it is built for high-volume retail and food service teams.

They already serve nearly 5,000 customers across tens of thousands of locations. The more you hire, the more you pay, and they make it painless enough to justify the cost.

Their entire system runs on automated text messaging that never sleeps. Candidates get job alerts, interview slots, and onboarding paperwork delivered straight to their phones.

The platform handles sourcing and screening without managers having to read through hundreds of resumes. It automatically schedules interviews and sends reminders so candidates actually show up.

They even built retention tools to keep new hires past their first ninety days. It is a complete staffing pipeline packaged into a chat window.

They skipped the slow grind of cold-calling franchisees one by one. Instead, they landed a massive partnership with Culver’s and became their corporate preferred hiring partner.

Seventy-five percent of Culver’s locations adopted it almost overnight.

That deal proved the model at enterprise scale. It opened doors to other major chains desperate to fix staffing turnover.

They just kept adding features based on actual manager feedback instead of guessing. The strategy worked because they let big wins pull smaller locations behind them.

The hourly labor market is brutally competitive and completely resistant to change. Managers at small locations hate learning new software.

Workstream had to convince an entire industry to abandon email, phone calls, and paper applications.

They are now trying to break into healthcare and retail, which operate on completely different compliance rules. If they cannot replicate their restaurant success in those sectors, their growth ceiling gets a lot closer.

Scaling an automated tool across heavily regulated industries is never simple, and legacy competitors are already circling.

Bond Capital stepped up to lead a $48 million round in 2021 after seeing what happens when you fix a broken hiring pipeline. The deal came in hot.

Lim reported getting twelve term sheets in just nine days. That level of interest told them the market recognized the shift.

Bond’s backing gave them the capital to scale engineering teams and push aggressively into enterprise partnerships. It proved that hourly workforce tech was no longer a niche side gig.

It was a legitimate software opportunity with serious margins.