New platform Hatch Exchange helps businesses temporarily hire stood-down workers amid the coronavirus crisis

• Hatch Exchange gives businesses that have been forced to stand down workers amid the coronavirus pandemic the opportunity to help their workers find temporary jobs elsewhere.

• The service was developed by The Iconic cofounder Adam Jacobs and Zip Co cofounder Chaz Heitner.

• Business Insider Australia spoke to Adam Jacobs about how the service works.

• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

---

The coronavirus pandemic has led several Australian businesses to shut their doors and stand down workers.

Several industries have been particularly impacted – from retail to tourism to food service – with companies such as Qantas, Rivers and Crown Resorts having stood down staff.

Hatch Exchange was developed to help companies forced to stand down staff redeploy their workers into other jobs. More than 70 companies have signed up since the service launched weeks ago on March 27. In its first two weeks, nearly 500 workers have been redeployed, some within 72 hours of applying.

Hatch Exchange was created by Adam Jacobs, cofounder of The Iconic, and Chaz Heitner, cofounder of Zip Co. The duo created Hatch, which helps university students find a job while studying, in 2017. Hatch Exchange is a new spinoff of the original platform.

Jacobs told Business Insider Australia the idea for Hatch Exchange came during the early days of the coronavirus crisis, when he was touching base with employers like Qantas, Woolworths and JP Morgan to see what was going on and how they can help. The biggest issue for some companies was having to stand down their staff, while others were seeing a surge in demand and needed to ramp up.

"It was simply by understanding that need by talking to a range of our existing partners," Jacobs said. And after putting a call out on LinkedIn to see if other businesses experienced these same issues, the Exchange was born. "Within seven days, we launched the Exchange," he said.

How Hatch Exchange works

Hatch Exchange works with both businesses that have stood down their workers – the "supply" side – and businesses that need workers – the "demand" side.

Some of the companies on the platform which have stood down staff include Qantas, Virgin and more recently, Crown Resorts. Once a business in this position registers for Hatch Exchange, they are given a custom landing page which they can send to their staff that lets them know of job opportunities are available. Employees can then opt-in if they want to find a job and input their skills and capabilities.

Hatch Exchange will then match the workers to opportunities like call centre positions, operations roles, digital marketing, software engineering, project management and cybersecurity. If a worker is interested in a particular role, they can apply.

"We're seeing government using the Exchange to hire," Jacobs said. "We're seeing online retailers like Pet Circle, we're startups [and] businesses big and small."

For companies looking for workers, they need to let Hatch know what they need. "They might say we need 100 contact centre people or we need 50 digital people and the specific requirements," Jacobs said. "And within 72 hours we then match them with the appropriate stood down workers on the Exchange."

Hatch Exchange is involved from start to finish

Hatch Exchange is an end to end model which is involved from when a company registers, through to matching workers to opportunities and helping workers with onboarding. "Technically, they're our employees during that placement and we on-hire them to what we call the host company where they've been placed at," Jacobs explained.

Hatch Exchange takes care of all the employment administration tasks including contracts, background checks, on-boarding, payroll, tax, superannuation and workplace health and safety.

What it ultimately wants to do is facilitate an easy exchange of people so that once the shutdowns are over, these stood down workers can easily return to their old jobs. Jacobs said it provides flexibility for "host" companies who don't know how long they will be hiring someone for and for the employee who won't know how long they'll need this job for.

"They're not hiring permanent employees, they're hiring a temporary person," he said.

Hatch Exchange also reports back to the "home" company a stood down worker has come out of. It lets the company know which staff members have registered, who has been successfully placed in a role, what type of role they're in, how long for and what company they are working for.

Jacobs said it's so that it's easy for those organisations to know where their people have gone and can invite them back at the right time.

"What that's about is protecting our economy's bounce-back," Jacobs said. "Because if you think about it most impacted sectors like aviation or tourism or retail, if they lose 50% of their talent and those people don't come back again, that is a huge impact on the ability of those industries to recover. It's a huge loss of IP and talent infrastructure. So we're making it easy for them not only to find employment right now but also to come back to their home employer so that the rebuild period can be much faster."

The next stage for Hatch Exchange

Jacobs said the service has three main focuses. It wants to encourage more companies that are hiring to sign up to the platform so that thousands more workers can find jobs. Especially as not everyone is eligible for the JobKeeper subsidy.

"JobKeeper doesn't address large portions of the stood down workforce, for example international workers, casuals with less than 12-month tenure, or stood down workers out of a company that hasn't been impacted by more than 30% negatively in terms of revenue," Jacobs pointed out.

The company also wants to work with the government to see how it can scale up its service and to help Australians reinvent themselves when they can eventually start going back to work.

"For many people their jobs won't come back," Jacobs said. "It's a sad truth that our industries won't look the same after COVID-19 as they did before. And the impact is that a lot of people will need to find a way to new forms of work.

"We believe the best way to do that is based on an understanding of someone's underlying transferable strengths, capabilities, motivators and to help them use those strengths to transition and reskill into something new."