Madrid-based Jobandtalent, a digital temporary staffing agency utilizing a platform that links temporary employees with businesses requiring regular casual staff in industries such as transportation and logistics, has secured an additional €88 million (~$108 million) for its Series C funding round. This brings the total capital raised in this round to €166 million, following a previous closing in 2019.

Established in 2009, the startup has accumulated over $290 million in funding throughout its decade-plus history. However, the company views itself as being in the initial stages of capitalizing on the substantial and expanding market for temporary employment, anticipating continued growth in demand as more sectors and processes become digitized in the years ahead.

Jobandtalent reports that over 80,000 workers have utilized its platform to find temporary positions in the past year, across the seven European and Latin American markets where it operates—specifically Spain, the U.K., Germany, France, Sweden, Mexico, and Colombia. Furthermore, more than 750 employers are leveraging the platform to “consistently oversee a significant portion of their workforce,” including companies like XPO, Ocado, Saint Gobain, Santander, Bayer, eBay, Huawei, Ceva Logistics, and Carrefour.

The company aims to challenge traditional staffing agencies like Adecco and Randstad, although other startups are emerging to serve the increasingly flexible temporary employment landscape. (Uber, for instance, experimented with a shift-finding application called Works in 2019, also targeting on-demand labor needs, but in collaboration with staffing agencies.)

Jobandtalent states that the number of workers seeking temporary employment on its platform is increasing by a factor of two annually, while its revenue has reached €500 million, and it has achieved positive EBITDA.

The increased Series C funding will be allocated to expanding into new markets and strengthening its presence in existing areas, the company announced today.

“We will continue to expand throughout Europe and explore additional opportunities, including the U.S. and select Latin American countries,” co-founder Juan Urdiales explained, emphasizing that Spain and the U.K. remain its primary markets, with logistics, last-mile delivery, warehousing, and transportation as its core sectors.

InfraVia, a French private equity firm, leads the expansion portion of its Series C round, investing €30 million through its Growth Tech Fund, which focuses on high-growth European B2B technology companies.

Current Jobandtalent investors, including Atomico, Seek, DN Capital, and Kibo Ventures, also participated in the Series C funding extension.

Urdiales attributed the decision to secure additional funding to the heightened potential for growth driven by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and its acceleration of demand for temporary staffing. “We are raising more capital because we foresee a significant opportunity to grow even faster than anticipated,” he stated. “The pandemic has facilitated increased adoption of our platform by both workers and employers.”

“Covid-19 has expedited the transformation of numerous industries. We’ve observed greater adoption of new technologies in the last nine months than in the preceding five years. The staffing market is undergoing a substantial transformation that will accelerate in the coming years, shifting from traditional brick-and-mortar structures to data-driven platforms that enhance the experience for both workers and employers,” Urdiales added in a statement.

“This market is exceptionally large, and we are still in the early stages of our journey (despite our extensive experience in the market),” he further noted via email when discussing the possibility of an IPO in the next few years. “We believe that if we maintain our current growth trajectory and attract additional private investors to support our expansion plans, we may remain a private company for a longer period.”

Jobandtalent has undergone several strategic shifts since its inception over a decade ago, initially aiming to leverage technology to streamline the complex and inherently human process of recruitment. The company tested various approaches before settling on a linguistic algorithm to analyze job postings and alert passive job seekers.

In 2016, it pivoted away from enterprise recruitment to focus on facilitating hiring for SMEs, recognizing the growing potential of temporary job matching driven by the rise of gig work and smartphone applications. Since then, it has refined its tools to meet the needs of employers managing substantial temporary workforces.

The rapid expansion of “flexible” platform-based labor—with Jobandtalent estimating a global pool of approximately 500 million temporary workers—also raises concerns about worker precarity, a topic that gig platforms often avoid.

However, Jobandtalent states it aims to address this issue as well. A key aspect of its offering to workers is enhanced benefits compared to those typically received by temporary employees.

The typical gig platform does not provide a comprehensive set of worker rights and benefits, nor does it guarantee future work assignments, often classifying on-demand labor as “self-employed” while simultaneously using mobile technology to closely manage this workforce through data, algorithms, and their own devices. 

This discrepancy between worker rights and platform control has led to numerous legal challenges in Europe—including in several of Jobandtalent’s operating markets (such as Spain, where Glovo continues to face legal challenges regarding its classification of delivery couriers, and France and the U.K., where Uber has lost employment tribunals concerning driver status).

EU lawmakers are also examining the conditions of gig workers, considering legislation to protect their rights. Some major platforms, like Uber, have already faced political pressure to offer a degree of insurance coverage in the region.

Jobandtalent’s commitment is to advocate for improved benefits for temporary workers—leveraging the scale of its platform to secure better terms, including increased job stability and reduced uncertainty.

“All workers have access to the same benefits,” Urdiales explained via email when asked about the structure of Jobandtalent’s perks. “These benefits include advance payroll, health insurance, training courses, and more (though not all benefits are available in every country, depending on the level of maturity of each market).”

“Our goal is to provide every worker who begins working through Jobandtalent with access to these benefits and offer a high standard of employment treatment, ensuring they have a status comparable to that of a permanent employee,” he added.

In a press release announcing its investment in Jobandtalent, InfraVia also suggests that the platform transforms “temporary work into a fulfilling professional step” by defining “career plans” for temporary workers, enabling them to “progress towards permanent and rewarding positions”.

However, when asked Urdiales about the data supporting temp-to-permanent transitions facilitated by its platform, he stated that this is “not a common occurrence”.

“Employers are not primarily seeking to add workers to their permanent workforce, and Jobandtalent is specifically addressing this for workers, aiming to provide consistent employment through various assignments at different companies, thereby enhancing their stability,” he explained, adding: “The market is increasingly moving towards a more precarious temporary employment model, and we believe that in this context, a platform like ours is even more valuable.”

Another significant benefit for workers using Jobandtalent’s temp work marketplace is convenience: It employs a mobile app-based approach, offering a single platform for gig workers to find their next assignment, apply for the job (through an in-app video interview), sign the contract, receive payment, and access the advertised benefits.

Its streamlining of recruitment and payroll processes is also a key attraction for employers considering Jobandtalent’s “workforce as a service” proposition—which claims to offer an enhanced solution (such as a CRM incorporating analytics for real-time workforce performance tracking) compared to traditional temp agency processes, along with lower costs and a greater volume of job applications.

Its worker-to-temp job matching technology is designed to alleviate the recruitment burden for employer customers through a proprietary worker quality scoring algorithm, known as the Worker Quality Score (WQS).

Urdiales explained that the criteria used to generate this score include attrition rate, absenteeism rate, and “certain productivity metrics of the workers we place” when asked for details, noting that this information is not publicly available on its website.

Algorithmic scoring of workers can have significant implications for worker autonomy.

It also carries legal risks in Europe, where EU citizens have rights related to their personal data, including access rights and (under the GDPR) the right to human review of purely automated decisions with legal or substantial consequences (and decisions affecting access to work would likely qualify).

In a recent ruling, for example, an Italian court determined that a reputation-ranking algorithm used by on-demand delivery platform Deliveroo discriminated against workers because the code failed to differentiate between legally protected reasons for absence (such as illness or striking) and less significant reasons for not fulfilling a scheduled shift. (Deliveroo no longer uses the algorithm in question.)

Uber is also facing legal challenges in the Netherlands regarding its use of algorithms to automatically terminate drivers and to utilize data and algorithms for driver profiling and management. Similarly, ride-hailing company Ola is facing a comparable lawsuit concerning its algorithmic management of gig workers. Consequently, EU courts will likely be occupied with examining the intersection of app-driven algorithmic management and regional data and labor rights for the foreseeable future.

The European Commission has also proposed a comprehensive reform of the regional rulebook for digital services, which includes a requirement for regulatory oversight of key decision-making algorithms to mitigate the risk of negative impacts such as bias and discrimination—although the implementation of any new laws is likely several years away.

When asked whether Jobandtalent’s worker users are provided with their own WQS and given the opportunity to appeal substantial decreases in the score—including the possibility of requesting a human review of any automated decisions—Urdiales stated: “The platform provides them with continuous feedback based on the key metrics they can influence (voluntary attrition, absenteeism, etc.) to help them improve their performance and, consequently, enhance their ability to secure more jobs in the future.”