Workmate, a Singapore-based on-demand staffing platform, has been acquired by Persol Asia Pacific, one of the region’s largest staffing service providers. Colleague focuses on frontline and critical staff, and the acquisition will enable it to expand its HR solutions across Asia Pacific. Workmate currently operates in Thailand and Indonesia and is expanding operations to Singapore this month.
Persol Asia Pacific is part of Persol Holdings, which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It is one of the largest HR companies in Japan and has invested in HR technology companies including Glint.
Colleague Thailand team
Colleague was founded in 2016 to help businesses find front-line employees while ensuring their employees have consistent employment. Currently, about 120,000 frontline workers and more than 800 companies are on its platform. The company defines frontline workers as essential workers who provide essential services to the public, especially in low- to medium-skilled jobs. Sectors include logistics and warehousing, manufacturing, food and beverage, retail and back office such as admin and customer service.
Workmate provides companies with a pre-filtered pool of short- and long-term work and uses proprietary AI-scoring algorithms to improve match quality and attendance, employee retention and productivity. The algorithms consider data points such as work experience, location and skills and combine that with first-hand behavioral data and employee history on the Workmate platform, such as attendance and supervisor ratings.
The subsidiary will retain its own brand after the acquisition and will operate independently with Persol Asia Pacific as the parent company.
