Answer
Jul 17, 2018 - 05:04 PM
Honestly, a simple answer is that it was easier for ridesharing apps especially Uber at the beginning. They hardly needed any marketing tactics as the heaps of applicants were excited about the opportunity.
The only message Uber rode on was the idea that they conveyed while seeking applicants: earn well, be your own boss,and be free! Going by Uber's earlier recruitment statistics, it seems this message sunk inside the hearts of pioneer drivers.
Fast-forward to today, competition is getting stiff as more entrants are getting into the industry. This necessitates the need to differentiate and amplify marketing tactics and efforts to remain popular among new drivers as well as existing ones.
Postmates Model Postmates is an on-demand delivery platform that is widely available in the USA enabling people to get anything delivered to them at a small fee from local stores.
The underlying difference in Postmates and Uber’s business model is that instead of taxis, Postmates is about delivery of goods using a human courier network.
Postmates business model offers an excellent value proposition for its clients, delivery persons as well as local stores. According to this business model, delivery persons earn 80% of the delivery fee while the company keeps the remaining 20%.
Now that the business and revenue model is clear, let’s get to the biggest problem for any start-up in the delivery sector: how to gain user and achieve some transactions.
This brings us to the big question: ‘How does Postmates recruit its customers and couriers?’ Well, as of now, Postmates is a widely popular on-demand app that gains its users by word of mouth.
In earlier stages of the startup, Postmates employed a combination of digital marketing, offline advertising, and other marketing methods.
Lyft Lyft arrived into the scene a bit later than Uber but crossed the $1 billion funding mark in mid-2015 nonetheless. Its earliest angel backers were Mayfield Fund, Alibaba, Rakuten, K9 Venures and Carl Icahn to name just but a few.
While they experienced a lag at the start, Uber’s latest misfortunes have helped Lyft emerge as one of the strongest competitors to the ride hailing app, albeit with less overall weight.
In a short span of a couple of years Lyft has continued to pile pressure on Uber’s hiring tactics by constantly matching and often exceeding the competitor’s sign-on offers and bonuses.
It is important to note that there are scores of drivers who drive for both Lyft and Uber, and often times do it at the same time to maximize their earnings.
A driver working on both platforms will benefit from Lyft’s feature where it does not need to run in the foreground to pick order alerts unlike Uber.
Lyft continues to differentiate itself as a driver-friendly app by setting up a 24/7 customer support for its drivers.
Another differentiating Lyft from Uber in terms of driver recruitment and retention is the tipping feature.
The Uber way
How to hire like Uber
What do you need to know if you want to recruit like Uber? Here are a few things I learnt from studying how Uber sources its recruits...
- Bulldoze into a market
When Uber first entered the San Francisco market in 2010, they were served a cease-and-desist order by city agencies if they were not going to acquire taxi licences or insurance.
Uber ignored the order while publishing a blog post detailing how the state regulations were not written with their cutting-edge technology in mind.
Uber faced similar tensions in Boston, Washington, China, India, and Kenya. They could not stand the heat in China though and ended up retreating in earnest.
- Become a Data-Driven Company
A large online business like Uber requires keeping track of thousands of drivers and trends and millions of riders. The weight of data emerging from these movements is unfathomable and requires a keen eye to try and draw insights from them.
The company employs extensive data analysis techniques to gather insights from actions of its drivers to figure out the areas that are making them most money as well as the hours during which they make most money.
In order for a firm to be able to differentiate itself from others, it needs to start thinking about how it is using its data.
To match Uber’s hiring standards, you need to consider studying the data analytics markets and probably source for an analyst to help make sense of the data you are gathering.
- Conduct Practical Interviews
Undeniably, Uber is a forward-thinking company that figured out a new business model to build a legion of loyal contractors, and found a vacuum in the market to fill. When it comes to hiring, the company sicks to tried-and-tested methods.
The company’s head of operations once talked about how Uber approaches hiring:
"Instead of asking fluffy tell-me-a-time-when kinds of questions, we just put people in scenarios that will most closely [resemble the] job that they will do and then create a real-world and real-time conversation that gives us an insight to their ability to handle problems on the fly."
Your company might be looking forward, but when it comes to the interview, stick to what works.
- They Assess Depending on Position
The company understands that it is important to keep interviews practical. It also knows that it is more important to know when to change up the process.
Assessments made during the hiring process at Uber are constantly changing depending on the position, instead of asking every applicant similar sets of questions at an interview.
This is followed by more position-specific set of questions depending on whether you are interviewing for an analytics job or a creative job.
- Uber is about options
Uber drivers honestly have a little more freedom compared to your average employee as they work like contractors. Their job is pegged on meeting a set minimum requirement and thenceforth, they can deck out of their cars at their pleasure.
Uber even allows drivers the option to earn extra income from placing advertisements in their cars. Working in this sector has been equated to hanging out with someone who is paying you for a ride.
To recruit like this company, you not only need to talk about the benefits but also make sure that you mention how it is like to work at your company. By all means make your potential recruits to visualize the greatness in working for your company.
- Tipping
Since introducing tipping to the platform, the company’s drivers earned $50 million in 50 days to eclipse Lyft’s $250 million in five years in tips.
By all standards, Uber is a great company with a differentiated hiring culture and I believe this is what sets them apart. In my view, we should not judge the company only by the number of new recruits but also its capacity to retain its thousands of existing drivers since the game is theirs to lose.
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