AUSTIN, Texas — The gig economy promised freedom. For a long time, it delivered frustration and inconsistent results.
Think about the last time you needed extra money. Christmas. A car payment. A bill that showed up early. You didn’t want a new career. You wanted a few shifts.
“A lot of people are looking for flexibility, but often that flexibility doesn’t come with consistency,” said Novo Constare, CEO of Indeed Flex.
Temporary staffing isn’t new, and businesses depend on it. “It’s completely essential for business to run effectively,” Constare said. “But the problem is it’s slow, antiquated, and quite opaque.”
An app built to find you work fast
Constare built Indeed Flex to fix that. The app finds gig work almost instantly.
Workers start with a screening interview, conducted by a person or by AI. Then comes a self-serve flow in the app.
“They go through an onboarding flow where they get a screening interview, either by a human or AI, and then a really simple self-serve flow on our app that gets them verified very, very quickly, in some cases immediately,” Constare said. “Once they’re verified, they’re legal to work, and we verify their skill sets.”
A teacher’s side hustle
TJ Johnson teaches. When school’s out for summer and the holidays, he opens the app.
Signing up took him about ten minutes. “It’s all done through the app. It’s probably a 10-minute process,” Johnson said. “They ask for personal information like name, address, and Social Security, so have those handy. Other than that, it’s self-serve. They guide you through the app.”
Once he’s in, he taps Browse and sees every open shift. Each listing shows the pay, the location, and the distance from his home. Checking his earnings is just as quick. He taps the pay tab and sees what he made last week.
Johnson has worked a range of jobs through the app. “I’ve done everything from catering shifts to fine dining shifts on there,” he said.
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How the matching works
Every time a business posts a job, it lists the skills and the role it needs. Then the algorithm goes to work.
“Our machine learning algorithm works out the best workers for that role and offers it to those workers first,” Constare said. It weighs each worker’s skill set, how often they’ve worked for Indeed Flex, and whether they’ve worked for that business before.
Every worker gets a rating, which gives companies more control over who shows up. A shift can also turn into a full-time job.
AI on both sides of the shift
Constare says the goal is AI that helps people find work, instead of AI that stands in their way.
One piece is an AI interview platform that workers can opt into. “We have an AI interview platform where, if you want, you can opt into AI screening and get interviewed at any time of the day,” Constare said.
That matters for people with day jobs. “It lets workers on the weekend, at 1 a.m., whenever it may be, get interviewed, verify they’re capable of certain roles, and get access to that extra work,” he said.
The app also includes two AI agents. Alma works for the business. “You speak to her in natural language and she’ll create a schedule for you, or increase the number of workers you need in a week’s time,” Constare said.
Lexi works for the worker. “Lexi is our support agent. Workers can get help with any query, any time of day.”
The bottom line
For Johnson, the math works. When he needs extra money, he opens the Indeed Flex app, and the work is there.
The new era of gig work took a minute to arrive. Now it takes ten minutes and a phone.