Broken hiring systems are pushing workers out of essential industries.

Frontline workers make up 80% of the global labor market, comprising over 2.7 billion people. Yet across healthcare, logistics, construction and energy, frontline workforce growth is a major challenge as businesses are hemorrhaging qualified candidates before they ever start work.

The problem is rarely a shortage of willing workers, but rather a hiring process that is so slow and administratively punishing that candidates abandon it altogether.

The NHS in England carries over 100,000 unfilled posts , including more than 25,000 nursing vacancies. The adult social care sector needs 470,000 additional posts by 2040. In energy, 300,000 new electricians will be needed in the next decade to build AI data centers.

Streamlining Frontline Hiring

Firstwork is a company that addresses the challenges with three capabilities: real-time verification that reviews submissions instantly and gives candidates specific feedback on the spot; automated screening calls and credential checks; and parallelized AI-assisted workflows that compress weeks of back-and-forth into under 20 minutes.

The AI-powered hiring and workforce platform was purpose-built for frontline industries by Vardhan Kapoor, who previously led operations at Deliveroo, and Shubham Choudhary, who has led engineering teams at Deel and Rippling.

"If you want to hire a banker at Goldman Sachs earning a million pounds a year, the paperwork is simple," says Kapoor. “But for a care worker earning around £12 an hour, the process becomes disproportionately heavy. We see this across the industry; less pay often has more paperwork. That is the real flaw in the system. We make it hardest to enter the jobs the country most urgently needs to fill.”

Kapoor grew up in the UAE, where migrant workers quite literally built the physical world around him. Airports, roads, homes, restaurants, hospitals; all depended on people whose path into work was far more painful than most people ever saw.

Years later, at Deliveroo, he saw the same thing from the inside: a worker ready to start, a business short of people, and then days or weeks of lost time because of documents, checks, training, scheduling, or some small missing step in the middle.

“The maddening part was that the hire had already happened,” he says. “The person wanted the job. The business wanted the person. The work existed. And still, the system couldn’t get them from ‘hired’ to ‘ready.’”

The Costs Of Hiring Delays To The Worker

Frontline hiring doesn’t break at the top of the funnel. It breaks after the offer. Someone is hired but still cannot work because a document is missing, a compliance check is pending, training is incomplete, or nobody has visibility into what is stuck. That costs the business revenue, but it also costs the worker their income.

“For a frontline worker, a one-week delay is not an operational inefficiency; it can be rent, fuel, childcare, or food,” says Kapoor. “The thing I couldn’t shake was the asymmetry. The people closest to the work have the most broken path into it. The physical economy depends on them, but the systems serving them are slower, more manual, and less dignified than the systems built for office jobs.”

When Automation Becomes A Game-Changer

Across last-mile, middle-mile and sortation operations, workforce readiness is critical to keeping logistics networks running smoothly. Tech-enabled logistics startup Relay Technologies optimizes the first, middle, and last mile of deliveries to help retailers reduce shipping costs, speed up delivery times, and lower carbon emissions.

Before working with Firstwork, onboarding workers was chaotic, says courier growth and compliance manager Dasha Tarasenkova. “Everything was manual, from document checking to compliance verification, and it was scattered across different tools that didn’t really talk to each other. The admin burden was significant.”

She describes automating the document and compliance processes through Firstwork as a game-changer. “During peak hiring periods, especially, our teams could process candidates so much faster, and we weren't constantly worrying about whether something had slipped through the cracks on the compliance side. It gave us both speed and peace of mind, which is a combination that's hard to come by.”

Transforming Workforce Growth

Early results are impressive, with completion rates increasing from 20% to 60%, and time per applicant down by 70%. What surprised Kapoor was how quickly the numbers moved once they removed the obvious friction. “Those are not marginal improvements. At that point, you are not just making an admin process more efficient. You are changing how quickly a business can staff against demand.”

But the candidate side was even more revealing.

“A lot of companies interpret drop-off as lack of intent; ‘The worker wasn’t serious’, ‘they didn’t really want the job’,” says Kapoor. “Sometimes that is true, but often it is a lazy explanation. We saw that many workers absolutely wanted the job. The process just made it unnecessarily hard to finish.

“The main thing we adjusted was visibility. Automation is powerful, but it cannot feel like a black box. The employer needs to know exactly where every applicant stands. The worker needs to know what is left, why it matters, and what happens next. Speed wins attention, but visibility earns trust.”

A Vital Wedge Into Core Labor Operations

The company has raised $5 million in seed funding from Gradient Ventures , with participation from Y Combinator. Partner Eylul Kayin explains the decision to invest.

She says: “FirstWork starts with activation because that is where frontline hiring loses the most value today. Activation is urgent, painful, and tied directly to revenue leakage, which gives Firstwork a high-frequency wedge into the customer’s core labor operations. But the data they capture in that process is what makes the long-term vision quite compelling.”

A decisive factor in their decision to invest was the founders’ backgrounds. “They spent their careers managing the precise friction points that Firstwork solves,” says Kayin. “Their deep domain expertise ensures the platform is engineered for the unique pressures of complex compliance regimes, seasonal spikes and high drop-off sensitivity, rather than just importing white-collar SaaS paradigms into a frontline world.”

The next 12 months will see Firstwork expand across U.K. health and social care, and in European markets, while scaling to support the hiring demands of data center buildouts, energy projects and large-scale logistics.

“The goal is not to build a shiny hiring tool; the goal is to make the path from hired to ready work the way it should have worked all along,” says Kapoor. “If we do that well, the speed follows. But speed is not the mission by itself. The mission is making frontline work easier to start, safer to manage, and more reliable for the businesses and workers the economy depends on.”