Momentum keeps companies growing, and at software firm
thisCLICKS, it means they have more desks to buy. The company has nearly doubled in size in the last 14 months, and now has 13 employees. With ongoing software development and client engagements, founder Chad Halvorson anticipates more hiring in 2012.
Part of the potential demand in the next year is likely to come from an application called "
When I Work," which allows companies to create efficiencies in their schedule management.
For example, a hospital can use the app to schedule work shifts for doctors and nurses at multiple locations, and to fold in shifts from satellite facilities like nursing homes. That way, a health-care organization can make sure to have the right number of staff members without scrambling to fill last-minute schedule gaps, or paying excessive overtime.
Halvorson thought of the concept in 1998, when he was a bag boy at a grocery store. The Internet was growing in popularity, and he wondered why he had to drive to work every week to check his schedule, when the information could be put online.
After a dozen years of application development, he revisited the idea and looked for software that had been developed for schedule management. He found only complicated programs that were difficult to learn and had too many features to be useful. Also, very few were mobile, he noticed.
In July 2010, he and his team at thisCLICKS launched When I Work, and since then, feedback has been phenomenal, Halvorson notes: "There are a mess of options out there for scheduling tools, but what I hear is that ours is so simple to use that people respond to it in a very positive way."
When I Work is the firm's first product for itself, rather than for a client, and Halvorson anticipates that the program's success will drive more development at the company. "Technology has been my obsession since high school," he says. "It's so much fun to do this work and see how you can make things easier for people."
Source: Chad Halvorson, thisCLICKS
Writer: Elizabeth Millard