As more and more coastal tech companies are betting on Chicago as a city where they can flourish, a San Francisco on-demand staffing company is hiring dozens of people in the Windy City after relocating its headquarters to Chicago earlier this year.
BlueCrew, founded in 2015, operates an on-demand job platform for applicants looking for low-skilled jobs, such as movers, cash register operators and forklift drivers. The tech company announced that it was moving from its home of San Francisco to Chicago in March, and it now employs more than 30 people in its offices inside the Merchandise Mart.
BlueCrew CEO Adam Roston said the company chose to relocate its headquarters to Chicago because of the city’s large industrial market, its growing tech talent pool and because the cost of living is cheaper in Chicago than in other tech hubs, like the Bay Area or New York.
“As we started growing, we realized that San Francisco wasn’t a great long-term home for BlueCrew,” said Roston, who joined the company as CEO in March. “It’s a competitive area for hiring and retaining talent, and it’s also not a great industrial and commercial market because it’s so expensive to be there.”
When BlueCrew opened its Chicago office, former mayor Rahm Emanuel was there to cut the ribbon. At the time, the city said that BlueCrew was joining a group of more than 80 technology companies that have or have pledged to relocate to Chicago or grow their footprint in the city.
Fintech company Tegus also relocated their headquarters from San Francisco to Chicago in March. And late last year, Salesforce announced plans to add 1,000 new jobs in Chicago over the next five years and move into a new 57-story tower on the riverfront, dubbed Salesforce Tower Chicago. Google has also committed to significantly expand in Chicago.
“Everyone knows there’s a lot of talent in San Francisco, Seattle, L.A. and New York, but there’s just as great of talent in Chicago,” Roston said. “There’s tons of great universities around here and it attracts a lot of talent from around the Midwest.”
Since opening the new Chicago office, BlueCrew has been on a hiring spree, saying it plans to fill 100 new roles across engineering, operations, customer support and finance roles over the next year.
BlueCrew, which was acquired by American holding company IAC last year, tries to distinguish itself from other staffing companies by ensuring each person using its platform is a W2-employee. BlueCrew also offers all users basic employment rights, like minimum wage, and overtime and sick pay. BlueCrew also offers health insurance.
The tech company vets workers up front, meaning workers don’t have to interview for each and every position they take on platform. When workers sign up for BlueCrew, they list their skills and qualifications, information that is used to decipher which jobs are appropriate for workers. Workers then only see nearby jobs on the BlueCrew platform that they qualify for.
“If you see a job in the app, you can accept it right away,” Roston said. “There’s no further interview process or back and forth with a recruiter.”
BlueCrew says it has more than 200,000 workers on the platform and fills thousands of jobs per month for its 250 clients, which include Vistaprint and Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. BlueCrew says it fills 90 percent of employer jobs in less than three days, while traditional staffing agencies can take two weeks to fill 60 to 70 percent of jobs. Clients pay BlueCrew a fee to source employees from its platform.
BlueCrew currently operates in more than 20 cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Atlanta, but has plans to have a presence in 30 U.S. markets by the end of this year.
