At Bow, we’ve been pursuing companies building “verticalized LinkedIn for deskless workers” for some time. We’ve seen it play out in hospitality and medical/nursing, so we were instantly interested when we learned about Skillit, a hiring platform for construction trades. Construction is a top 5 labor pool in the US, and it’s not going to be disrupted by AI any time soon. There are over 9M workers today, with a labor shortage of over half a million, a trend that’s only worsening. And this doesn’t factor in the 50–100% churn companies see in their labor force each year.
Skillit is proving essential to construction firms because it acquires workers, validates their skills and credentials, and then presents them for hire in exchange for a platform access fee. This is the LinkedIn model—workers fill out profiles, and employers get access to recruiting tools—but highly specialized for construction. Specialization allows Skillit to amass rich data on the worker side of the platform (e.g., assessment scores, base pay preferences, and prior job experiences), which makes the platform that much more powerful for recruiting.
There’s a strong marketplace network effect at work here, too. Since Skillit workers pass interviews at 2X the rate of candidates from horizontal solutions, construction companies tend to consolidate their hiring to the platform over time. Workers want to be on the platform with the most hiring—and companies want to hire from the largest platform. So the flywheel spins.
Of course another thing to love about the company is that AI is not going to build you an arena or a datacenter—skilled workers have to do that—so its underlying customers are probably more helped than hurt by the AI boom. But, this type of verticalized platform needs to put the best of AI in customers’ hands in order to win, and Skillit does that by solving a chronic pain point for recruiters with its scheduling agent, Sam. Sam eliminates 90% of scheduling work, freeing recruiters up to focus on hiring. Typically, out of 100 craft workers contacted, only 17 reach a phone interview, and just 3 get hired. With Sam, that jumps to 70 interviews and 14 hires.
We’re thrilled to be working with founder/CEO Fraser as the team builds the de-facto platform for hiring construction skilled trade.