Vardhan Kapoor, Firstwork

“Payday lending is shocking. You might not see it, but it traps tens of millions of Americans in a vicious cycle. With the technology we have in 2025, no one should be forced into these predatory situations.

Why does this still exist? Time-to-hire varies from two to three months for blue collar roles, and then it’s often another month until payday. So if you get laid off and you’re one of America’s most financially vulnerable workers, you might not have savings to make it.

The solution is filling these jobs in minutes, not months. Most of this time is spent on paperwork because you've got one person manually checking each application document. Someone goes on vacation—the whole process stops. Or maybe an applicant checks the wrong box on a form; it could be two weeks before HR spots it, and another two weeks to sort it out. It's insanely ancient, but this is how 99% of the market still works.

Even worse, most hiring technology orients around white-collar work because that’s what Silicon Valley knows. Classic HR application tracking systems are obsessed with multiple rounds of interviews, but you want frontline people to start ASAP. The tech stack just isn't built for blue-collar workers, so companies muddle through doing things on Excel sheets the way they always have for high-volume hiring.

We use AI to fix all this and cut through wait times. AI can catch errors in advance and speed timelines up. So when an application gets in front of a hiring manager, they can make a decision immediately. We have clients where time-to-hire has gone from weeks to under 10 minutes. That kind of speed changes the lives of the workers who get hired and their families, too.”