How WorkBite built a 200-person on-demand staffing community without compromising on fair wages
How WorkBite uses Zelos
WorkBite Recruiting is an Estonian staffing agency on a mission to put flexible employment and fair wages in the same sentence. The company runs short-term staffing alongside traditional recruitment, with a pre-qualified community of 200+ workers (called WorkBiters) at the centre of both.
WorkBite uses the Zelos Team Management app to coordinate every gig, every shift, and every payroll cycle. Each WorkBiter has a profile with skills, qualifications, and preferences. When a matching job opens, they get a push notification and claim it from their phone. At month-end, recruiters export the data straight from Zelos for client billing and worker payroll.
The challenge
The Estonian temp staffing industry carries a stigma. Temporary staff are often assumed to be incompetent, unreliable, and underpaid. WorkBite was founded to challenge all three assumptions. But holding that standard at scale creates a real operational problem.
“We send multiple job offers to hundreds of people every day. It’s extremely important that these offers only go out to relevant WorkBiters,” says Kreete Juurak, co-founder and HR manager. Without profile-based targeting, recruiters would spend their days manually checking candidates against job requirements.
The fair-wage standard adds another layer. WorkBite demands that clients treat WorkBiters equally with their own employees: employee lunches, transport compensation, and hourly rates that match permanent staff. Clients pushing for 5€-an-hour adult temps don’t make it through. Maintaining these standards across a high-volume, on-demand model needs infrastructure that can keep up.
On top of that, Estonia’s service industry is in crisis. Many employees left during the COVID lockdowns and never returned. WorkBite stepped in to provide a sustainable, flexible source of qualified workers. That only works if the matching system moves fast enough to fill last-minute shifts.
The solution
The Zelos app filters every job posting against each WorkBiter’s profile. Skills, qualifications, and preferences are set once and updated as workers train up. New gigs only become visible to the people qualified to do them, and the people themselves choose what to claim.
When a matching shift opens, WorkBiters get a push notification and can claim it directly from their phone. No back-and-forth with recruiters, no manual approval queues, no shared spreadsheets.
Timestamped work logs for each shift give WorkBite a clean record of who showed up, when, and for how long. At month-end, recruiters export the data straight from Zelos: one report for client billing, another for WorkBiter payroll. The same logs help enforce community standards.
“We provide a lot of value to our members, but our demands are equally high,” Kreete explains. “Missing work usually leads to expulsion from the community. A customisable database and timestamped work logs for each workbite help us make sure the community plays by the rules.”
The app sits inside a community-first recruitment model. Most WorkBiters join after a recommendation from someone already inside. That keeps quality high and lets WorkBite scale without losing the personal touch. All 200+ workers are known by name to the recruitment team.
The results
200+ pre-qualified WorkBiters self-claim hundreds of targeted job offers every day, with no recruiters sorting candidates job by job.
WorkBite runs an active community of more than 200 pre-qualified WorkBiters with a small recruitment team that handles hundreds of daily job offers. That workload would otherwise need a much larger office staff.
Quality stays high because of who’s in the community and how they’re paid. WorkBiters often train new hires at client companies or step in as frontline managers, and it’s common for them to be offered permanent contracts by clients who first met them as temps.
Youth employment has become one of WorkBite’s strongest stories. Companies that initially doubted the skills of 15-to-17-year-olds frequently call back asking to hire the youngsters full time after their first workbites.
And Estonia’s service industry now has a reliable answer to its post-COVID labour shortage. “Our worker-centric approach has already broken many ancient patterns on the Estonian labour market,” says Kreete. “We’re letting some fresh air in.”